Date of Award

5-12-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Information Science

First Advisor

Nitin Agarwal

Abstract

The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group that descends from the general region of Central and East Asia. In recent years, the Chinese government has been accused of violating the human rights of Uyghur Muslims by imprisoning them in camps and subjecting them to forced labor, forced abortion, and other harmful treatments. Aside from western news outlets, lot of information is available on blogs regarding the Uyghur issue. The information found in these blogs provide an alternative lens to analyze the Uyghur discourse from non-traditional media outlets. However, it is difficult to show the connection between blogs and how information flows through blogs. In other social media platform such as Twitter there are defined network structures that shows how information spread, for example between a user and their followers. Existing studies have identified the connections between blogs by focusing on different blog contents, such as the authors and comments. This research aims to employ a systematic approach to analyze information spread through hyperlinks from Uyghur-related blog posts in the Indo-Pacific region. To achieve this, we analyzed 318 blog posts and 5,598 hyperlinks published from January 2019 to September 2022. The analysis included topic modeling and toxicity analysis to identify the main topics in each blog post and their toxicity trend. The topics generated from the topic modeling were mapped onto a network of hyperlinks to develop a novel topic-induced hyperlink network. This network helped examine, analyze, and visualize the network of blog hyperlinks that further revealed core links raising awareness about the oppression of the Uyghur community.

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