TY - GEN
T1 - The Times They Are A-Changin'
T2 - 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2024
AU - Tsoukaladelis, Chris
AU - Kondracki, Brian
AU - Balasubramanian, Niranjan
AU - Nikiforakis, Nick
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2024 IEEE.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - The current news landscape is in the middle of a major transition. Digital news are quickly overtaking legacy media (such as, newspapers and TV programs), offering a slew of benefits to consumers including ease and immediacy of access. They also, however, allow publishers to arbitrarily modify the articles they publish, at any time after the article has been released. Little is known about how often this happens and to what extent these post-publication edits change an article's original message.In this paper, we shine light to this previously ignored phenomenon by collecting and analyzing a corpus of more than 600k online news articles, published by tens of U.S. news publishers over a period of nine months. We discover that 165k articles exhibit post-publication changes and use natural language processing tools to identify the magnitude of these changes and their effect. Among others, we find that different publishers modify their articles at different rates, with a publisher's ranking and political bias affecting the frequency of changes and that over 15% of changed paragraphs do not "follow"their original versions. Finally, we discover that most of the evaluated publishers do not properly note these changes to their articles, using non-descriptive notices and updated timestamps that cannot be used by readers to assess what has changed.
AB - The current news landscape is in the middle of a major transition. Digital news are quickly overtaking legacy media (such as, newspapers and TV programs), offering a slew of benefits to consumers including ease and immediacy of access. They also, however, allow publishers to arbitrarily modify the articles they publish, at any time after the article has been released. Little is known about how often this happens and to what extent these post-publication edits change an article's original message.In this paper, we shine light to this previously ignored phenomenon by collecting and analyzing a corpus of more than 600k online news articles, published by tens of U.S. news publishers over a period of nine months. We discover that 165k articles exhibit post-publication changes and use natural language processing tools to identify the magnitude of these changes and their effect. Among others, we find that different publishers modify their articles at different rates, with a publisher's ranking and political bias affecting the frequency of changes and that over 15% of changed paragraphs do not "follow"their original versions. Finally, we discover that most of the evaluated publishers do not properly note these changes to their articles, using non-descriptive notices and updated timestamps that cannot be used by readers to assess what has changed.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85199207547
U2 - 10.1109/SP54263.2024.00033
DO - 10.1109/SP54263.2024.00033
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
SP - 1573
EP - 1589
BT - Proceedings - 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2024
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 20 May 2024 through 23 May 2024
ER -