Online discourse covers a wide range of topics and many actors tailor their content to impact online discussions through carefully crafted messages and targeted campaigns. Yet the scale and diversity of online media content make it difficult to evaluate the impact of a particular message. In this paper, we present a new technique that leverages semantic similarity to quantify the change in the discussion after a particular message has been published. We use a set of press releases from environmental organisations and tweets from the climate change debate to show that our novel approach reveals a heavy-tailed distribution of response in online discourse to strategic communications.

翻译：在线讨论涵盖广泛的主题，众多行动者通过精心设计的信息和有针对性的宣传活动来影响在线讨论。然而，在线媒体内容的规模和多样性使得评估特定信息的影响力变得困难。本文提出了一种新方法，利用语义相似度来量化特定信息发布后讨论的变化。我们使用一组环保组织的新闻稿和气候变化辩论中的推文，证明了我们的新方法揭示了在线话语中对战略传播的回应呈现重尾分布。