https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00538-w
Research
Using semantic similarity to measure the echo of strategic communications
1
Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
2
Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
3
Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
4
Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Received:
17
May
2024
Accepted:
4
March
2025
Published online:
12
March
2025
Many actors use strategic communications to impact media debates through targeted messages and campaigns, but the scale and diversity of online media content make it difficult to evaluate the impact of a particular message or campaign. In this paper, we present a new technique that leverages semantic similarity of actor messages and media content to quantify the change in media discourse after a particular message has been published. We demonstrate our approach by measuring the impact of press releases from environmentally-active organisations on social media discussions about climate change. Our results show a heavy-tailed distribution of responses to these strategic communications, suggesting that relatively few messages have a substantive impact on online discourse.
Key words: Text embedding / Impact evaluations / Public influence
© The Author(s) 2025
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