Short biography
Martin Wessel is a PhD student at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology in Munich. He holds a Bachelor’s in Philosophy & Economics (University of Bayreuth, 2020) and a Master’s in Social and Economic Data Science (University of Konstanz, 2023). His research focuses on using language models to detect media bias, evaluating and improving their robustness, and assessing their impact on media consumption.
Besides his research, Martin is a member of the management team at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), a joint institution of both TUM and LMU Munich.
Contact
m.wessel@media-bias-research org
References
2025
Hinterreiter, Smi; Wessel, Martin; Schliski, Fabian; Echizen, Isao; Latoschik, Marc Erich; Spinde, Timo
NewsUnfold: Creating a News-Reading Application That Indicates Linguistic Media Bias and Collects Feedback Proceedings Article Forthcoming
In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'25), AAAI, Copenhagen, Denmark, Forthcoming.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: crowdsourcing, HITL, linguistic bias, media bias, news bias
@inproceedings{Hinterreiter2025NewsUnfold,
title = {NewsUnfold: Creating a News-Reading Application That Indicates Linguistic Media Bias and Collects Feedback},
author = {Smi Hinterreiter and Martin Wessel and Fabian Schliski and Isao Echizen and Marc Erich Latoschik and Timo Spinde},
url = {https://media-bias-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Preprint_ICWSM_25_NewsUnfold.pdf},
year = {2025},
date = {2025-06-01},
urldate = {2025-06-01},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'25)},
volume = {19},
publisher = {AAAI},
address = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
abstract = {Media bias is a multifaceted problem, leading to one-sided views and impacting decision-making. A way to address digital media bias is to detect and indicate it automatically through machine-learning methods. However, such detection is limited due to the difficulty of obtaining reliable training data. Human-in-the-loop-based feedback mechanisms have proven an effective way to facilitate the data-gathering process. Therefore, we introduce and test feedback mechanisms for the media bias domain, which we then implement on NewsUnfold, a news-reading web application to collect reader feedback on machine-generated bias highlights within online news articles. Our approach augments dataset quality by significantly increasing inter-annotator agreement by 26.31},
keywords = {crowdsourcing, HITL, linguistic bias, media bias, news bias},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Media bias is a multifaceted problem, leading to one-sided views and impacting decision-making. A way to address digital media bias is to detect and indicate it automatically through machine-learning methods. However, such detection is limited due to the difficulty of obtaining reliable training data. Human-in-the-loop-based feedback mechanisms have proven an effective way to facilitate the data-gathering process. Therefore, we introduce and test feedback mechanisms for the media bias domain, which we then implement on NewsUnfold, a news-reading web application to collect reader feedback on machine-generated bias highlights within online news articles. Our approach augments dataset quality by significantly increasing inter-annotator agreement by 26.31
2023
Spinde, Timo; Richter, Elisabeth; Wessel, Martin; Kulshrestha, Juhi; Donnay, Karsten
What do Twitter comments tell about news article bias? Assessing the impact of news article bias on its perception on Twitter Journal Article
In: Online Social Networks and Media, vol. 37-38, pp. 100264, 2023, ISSN: 2468-6964.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Hate speech detection, media bias, Sentiment analysis, Transfer learning
@article{SPINDE2023100264,
title = {What do Twitter comments tell about news article bias? Assessing the impact of news article bias on its perception on Twitter},
author = {Timo Spinde and Elisabeth Richter and Martin Wessel and Juhi Kulshrestha and Karsten Donnay},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246869642300023X},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2023.100264},
issn = {2468-6964},
year = {2023},
date = {2023-01-01},
journal = {Online Social Networks and Media},
volume = {37-38},
pages = {100264},
abstract = {News stories circulating online, especially on social media platforms, are nowadays a primary source of information. Given the nature of social media, news no longer are just news, but they are embedded in the conversations of users interacting with them. This is particularly relevant for inaccurate information or even outright misinformation because user interaction has a crucial impact on whether information is uncritically disseminated or not. Biased coverage has been shown to affect personal decision-making. Still, it remains an open question whether users are aware of the biased reporting they encounter and how they react to it. The latter is particularly relevant given that user reactions help contextualize reporting for other users and can thus help mitigate but may also exacerbate the impact of biased media coverage. This paper approaches the question from a measurement point of view, examining whether reactions to news articles on Twitter can serve as bias indicators, i.e., whether how users comment on a given article relates to its actual level of bias. We first give an overview of research on media bias before discussing key concepts related to how individuals engage with online content, focusing on the sentiment (or valance) of comments and on outright hate speech. We then present the first dataset connecting reliable human-made media bias classifications of news articles with the reactions these articles received on Twitter. We call our dataset BAT - Bias And Twitter. BAT covers 2,800 (bias-rated) news articles from 255 English-speaking news outlets. Additionally, BAT includes 175,807 comments and retweets referring to the articles. Based on BAT, we conduct a multi-feature analysis to identify comment characteristics and analyze whether Twitter reactions correlate with an article’s bias. First, we fine-tune and apply two XLNet-based classifiers for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis. Second, we relate the results of the classifiers to the article bias annotations within a multi-level regression. The results show that Twitter reactions to an article indicate its bias, and vice-versa. With a regression coefficient of 0.703 (p<0.01), we specifically present evidence that Twitter reactions to biased articles are significantly more hateful. Our analysis shows that the news outlet’s individual stance reinforces the hate-bias relationship. In future work, we will extend the dataset and analysis, including additional concepts related to media bias.},
keywords = {Hate speech detection, media bias, Sentiment analysis, Transfer learning},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
News stories circulating online, especially on social media platforms, are nowadays a primary source of information. Given the nature of social media, news no longer are just news, but they are embedded in the conversations of users interacting with them. This is particularly relevant for inaccurate information or even outright misinformation because user interaction has a crucial impact on whether information is uncritically disseminated or not. Biased coverage has been shown to affect personal decision-making. Still, it remains an open question whether users are aware of the biased reporting they encounter and how they react to it. The latter is particularly relevant given that user reactions help contextualize reporting for other users and can thus help mitigate but may also exacerbate the impact of biased media coverage. This paper approaches the question from a measurement point of view, examining whether reactions to news articles on Twitter can serve as bias indicators, i.e., whether how users comment on a given article relates to its actual level of bias. We first give an overview of research on media bias before discussing key concepts related to how individuals engage with online content, focusing on the sentiment (or valance) of comments and on outright hate speech. We then present the first dataset connecting reliable human-made media bias classifications of news articles with the reactions these articles received on Twitter. We call our dataset BAT - Bias And Twitter. BAT covers 2,800 (bias-rated) news articles from 255 English-speaking news outlets. Additionally, BAT includes 175,807 comments and retweets referring to the articles. Based on BAT, we conduct a multi-feature analysis to identify comment characteristics and analyze whether Twitter reactions correlate with an article’s bias. First, we fine-tune and apply two XLNet-based classifiers for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis. Second, we relate the results of the classifiers to the article bias annotations within a multi-level regression. The results show that Twitter reactions to an article indicate its bias, and vice-versa. With a regression coefficient of 0.703 (p<0.01), we specifically present evidence that Twitter reactions to biased articles are significantly more hateful. Our analysis shows that the news outlet’s individual stance reinforces the hate-bias relationship. In future work, we will extend the dataset and analysis, including additional concepts related to media bias.