What Polecat Gets Right, as a Gen Z Media Psychology
- eleanorcrowther
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
By: Ella Crowther, Communications Specialist
I’ve spent the past year researching how young people can get lost within online communities and the intoxicating nature of hateful rhetoric. As a Gen Z, I also find myself trying to remember what life was like before kids were served iPads as pacifiers. It’s also easy, of course, to raise an eyebrow at A.I. ChatGPT is often guilty of making up references and information and telling you what it thinks you want to hear. On top of that, it’s no secret that A.I. poses real risks for the environment, with data centers producing electronic waste and consuming large amounts of water in areas that are often already water scarce.
A tenet of media psychology, however, is that media is not always something to run away from and immediately label as “bad.” So, it is with all those things in mind, that I write to you to tell you what I believe Polecat gets right:
Our Climate Impact: 99% of Polecat’s data center use is offset by renewable energy. We also optimize to use lightweight models where possible. Our mission to be cost- and time-efficient aligns with our dedication to being energy efficient.
Measuring Sentiment: I got asked recently what the difference is between PolecatX’s sentiment analysis and simply going on social media and reading the conversation myself. It’s a good question, and the short answer is that PolecatX goes much deeper. We don’t just assign negative sentiment to news with the word “bad” and “good” with positive sentiment. Using our large language model (LLM), we understand how different content is received and contextualized within the larger conversation for each company, brand, and/ or person. You can compare two completely different political candidates and see how the same news events are tracked but result in very different dips and upticks.
The Impact Score: While typical media monitoring might show you the events regarding your company at a given moment, Polecat measures and reports the impact of who’s reporting these events. In Polecat’s RepVault, you’re able to track just how influential the source is because our A.I. tool has ranked the key players within social media and has analyzed which news sources have been read by the most relevant audiences to you. As you can see below, it’s one thing to have positive sentiment, but what does it mean if it’s not having the same impact as the negative sentiment?
RepVault graph depicting sentiment and impact of standard news coverage of the United States Government. 4. Track the Headlines: In the age of being unsure how much you can trust A.I., you can track down each and every data point and which source it comes from in both PolecatX and Polecat’s RepVault. On top of that, you can track the different conversations happening on social media versus standard news, which becomes increasingly important as Gen Z primarily gets their news from social media and non-traditional news sources.
I am no stranger to the scary and unpredictable place the internet can be and the climate risks that A.I. pose are equally as fraught. What I hope I’ve been able to show you is that Polecat is credible, smart, and is constantly evolving how we can contextualize our tools within this ever-evolving world. Our tools help companies and businesses understand how to be responsible by allowing them to understand what the news and social media has to say about them, and what risks lay ahead among rapid policy changes. I’m reminded of a quote from Octavia Butler: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.” Allow us to help you to understand change.
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