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Crisis motivates people to track news closely, and this increased engagement can expose individuals to politically sensitive information unrelated to the initial crisis. We use the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China to examine how crisis affects information seeking in countries that normally exert significant control over access to media. The crisis spurred censorship circumvention and access to international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals circumvented censorship, they not only received more information about the crisis itself but also accessed unrelated information that the regime has long censored. Using comparisons to democratic and other authoritarian countries also affected by early outbreaks, the findings suggest that people blocked from accessing information most of the time might disproportionately and collectively access that long-hidden information during a crisis. Evaluations resulting from this access, negative or positive for a government, might draw on both current events and censored history.

Disparities for women and minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers have continued even amidst mounting evidence for the superior performance of diverse workforces. In response, we launched the Diversity and Science Lecture series, a cross-institutional platform where junior life scientists present their research and comment on diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. We characterize speaker representation from 79 profiles and investigate topic noteworthiness via quantitative content analysis of talk transcripts. Nearly every speaker discussed interpersonal support, and three-fifths of speakers commented on race or ethnicity. Other topics, such as sexual and gender minority identity, were less frequently addressed but highly salient to the speakers who mentioned them. We found that significantly co-occurring topics reflected not only conceptual similarity, such as terms for racial identities, but also intersectional significance, such as identifying as a Latina/Hispanic woman or Asian immigrant, and interactions between concerns and identities, including the heightened value of friendship to the LGBTQ community, which we reproduce using transcripts from an independent seminar series. Our approach to scholar profiles and talk transcripts serves as an example for transmuting hundreds of hours of scholarly discourse into rich datasets that can power computational audits of speaker diversity and illuminate speakers' personal and professional priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadcast media consumption is becoming more social. Many online video "livestreams" come with embedded livestreaming chatboxes, uniting the on-screen and social components. We investigate how streaming chat shapes perceptions of political events. We conducted a field experiment during the September 2019 Democratic Primary Debate where subjects were assigned to view the debate with or without streaming chat. We use text analyses to characterize the frequency, toxicity, and tone of comments in the chat. Our experimental findings indicate that Democratic subjects assigned to the Facebook (social) chat condition reported lower affect toward Democrats and a worse viewing experience, aligned with the toxic and overwhelming nature of the chat. The polarity of candidate-directed comments also influenced candidate evaluations and perceived performance in the polls. This suggests that consumers of mass media will be both more immediately affected by social feedback and likely to make inferences about the experiences of their fellow consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]