King Snowden and the Fall of Wikileaks – Network Mapping of Newsmakers

The GDELT Global Knowledge Graph to identify all people mentioned in articles referencing Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks. A list was compiled of every person mentioned in each article, and all names mentioned in an article together were connected. The end result was a network diagram of all of the people mentioned in the global news coverage of Snowden, Assange, and Wikileaks the last seven months and who has appeared with whom in that coverage. Clustering and community finding were used make the overall macro-level structure of the network instantly clear, teasing apart the clusters and connections among the newsmakers defining news coverage of government leaking. The findings suggest that Wikileaks is fading in global coverage of leaking, while Snowden has become his own "brand" which is rapidly displacing Wikileaks.

Read the Full Article in Foreign Policy magazine.