The Way We Think About Ourselves

Abstract

In the new normal of fake news, wide-scale disinformation and alternate facts, the need for fact-checks and bot detection is real and immediate. It is generally accepted that altering the psyche, our thinking, is the most potent form of controlling and shaping human behavior. Fake news, disinformation and alternate reality are all aimed at shaping our beliefs. In this experiment, we set out to understand if the stream of news articles is itself designed to influence society at large, either to think positively or negatively – in other words can dictate how society views itself – disconnected from reality. In this exercise we are seeking to identify if there is a systematic prevalence of positive/negative sentiment in a given stream of news articles, using standard NLP techniques.