Morality-based analysis of viewer’s comments on internet TV news program

Abstract

With the rise of Internet TV and other new media, people are now viewing the news through a variety of conduits. In addition, the influence of news media on people is changing. Viewers can post comments in Internet TV, and these comments has the viewers’ opinions of the news contents. Therefore, analysis of viewers comments is important in revealing the effect of the news. In addition, these comments are posted based on the morality of the viewers, and point of view of morality is considered important in the analysis of viewer comments in news. Therefore, this study purpose is to clarify the opinion on Internet TV news programs from a moral-based analysis viewers’ comments. This study analyzed the trend of viewer comments on ABEMA news programs using comment length and the application of two methods. First, the morality of viewer comments was analyzed by calculating the moral/immoral expression rate for each program using the moral foundation dictionary. Second, the distributed expressions of viewer comments (calculated by Doc2Vec) were clustered by k-means++, and program trends were analyzed using the cluster characteristics. The results indicated that there was no difference in comment length between the two program types. Comments on soft-news programs had a high moral/immoral expression rate for politics or current events. In contrast, comments of hard-news programs did not show a characteristic trend. A viewer can easily participate in the discussion, because the soft-news program deals with the same news for a long time as the news content is limited compared to the non-discussion program.