Using AI to Understand the 'Year of the Election'
Try out Overtone's demonstration tool
This year, 2024, has been called the “super election” year, with billions casting votes in contests that will set the course for large parts of the world for the foreseeable future.
Some estimates say that elections will impact more than 40% of the global population this year, meaning that all of those individuals are making decisions about which leaders and policies best represent them.
A big part of making those decisions is news, which acts both as an explainer of the stakes and an independent source of information on those challenging for power. Previous studies have shown that recommending articles based off of their predicted engagement, which is the way that many sites share news, leads to the amplification of angry news.
Overtone is pleased to show what looking at more human, qualitative data from the articles themselves, rather than just engagement, can do to help people understand news, and to help those that deal with news, from publishers to advertisers, build a sustainable, healthy ecosystem that also works for their businesses. In the examples below, it is not hard to see the insights on a political candidate and to imagine similar insight for the leader of a company.
As part of our work with Innovate UK, which is supporting our upcoming “tone” model (see more below), we are making this demonstration public for our readers, with articles about the British general election on July 4. (Demo not intended for mobile)
Insight into leaders
Beyond just using the tool to look at articles, you can also look at the Insights tab to dig further into understanding how coverage of the election is unfolding. On the first graph on the page you can see the different types of articles about the election, as well as those articles over time. The total numbers of articles have gone up and down, though by using the filters to look at the different Overtone “types” you can see, for example, a peak of opinionation about the election on June 27, right after the final head-to-head debate between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer.
You can also see what individual candidates are up to. By filtering down to just articles on Starmer, you can see the potential next leader doing a growing barrage of Interview Stories as the public gets to know him better.
On Sunak’s side there are some interviews, though more noticeable is the growing number of reporting pieces and particularly Investigation pieces, including pieces on the police looking into a scandal that saw the prime minister’s aide investigated for allegedly placing bets on the day of the election before it was called.
The second tool shows articles that mention conspiracies or conspiratorial language. As we have discussed in previous newsletters, many of these pieces are blocked from receiving advertising based on their keywords, though more nuanced models can differentiate articles that mention conspiracies in the context of news (Low Risk) from articles that blast the “Westminster cabal.” (High Risk)
Introducing Tone
Overtone is pleased to provide here the first look at our new “tone” model that evaluates for emotional tones such as happy, sad, angry, funny, or purely informational. We are still working partners in publishing and other industries to fine-tune the model and the categories it looks at (reach out if you’d like to be involved), though wanted to show how this model can help understand news at scale by looking at how authors are writing about people like candidates.
Below you can see a graph showing more than 27,000 mentions of Sunak, Starmer and the Liberal Democrats’ leader Ed Davey from recent articles. While many of these pieces mention them in purely “informational” ways, there are clear differences in the other emotional tones.
Sunak is the subject of the most sad mentions, with articles like this one from the Financial Times that includes statements like “Only a couple of months later Sunak implicitly recognised the hopelessness of his "change" pitch by bringing back Cameron as his foreign secretary.”
Meanwhile, Starmer is the subject of the highest percentage of angry mentions, with articles both from the right-wing press like this one from The Sun blasting him as a “hard-left socialist” and this one from the left-wing Canary calling him “undoubtedly a safe pair of hands for the ruling class.”
Particularly interesting to see for us as we were developing the model, it was also able to pick up on the fact that Lib Dem leader Davey is often performing stunts and photo ops, and the differences that his coverage receives because of that. Davey, who recently went bungee jumping on the campaign trail, sees a whopping 20% of all mentions of him in a funny or happy way.
Blog post
After attending the Cannes Festival of Creativity last month, Christopher wrote up a blog post of his impressions, including interviews with publishers and agencies thinking about how to move the internet forward. Read it below
