Narrative Contagion measures how far the dominant framing of a crisis has spread into news coverage of other, nominally unrelated topics. When a crisis narrative "infects" broader discourse — appearing in economic commentary, domestic political debates, and cultural coverage that would not normally reference it — it signals that the crisis has achieved a level of salience that may be self-reinforcing and harder to de-escalate.
High narrative contagion also tends to attract new actors who want to position themselves relative to the dominant story, which can introduce additional instability.
The system monitors a broad RSS corpus beyond the crisis-specific feeds. It counts the proportion of articles in non-crisis feeds that contain key named entities and concepts associated with the crisis (extracted by the AI pipeline). This cross-feed mention rate is compared against the 30-day baseline for that crisis to produce a normalised contagion score.
High (above 0.65): The crisis dominates the broader information environment. Political leaders and commentators who normally focus on domestic issues are being forced to address it. This can accelerate international involvement — both helpful (mediation offers) and unhelpful (domestic political grandstanding that constrains negotiating room).
Low (below 0.25): The crisis is largely contained within specialist coverage. General audiences are not engaged. This is normal for most crises most of the time, and does not necessarily mean the situation is less serious — only less visible.
Broad RSS corpus managed by the POLYCRISIS ingestion pipeline. Named entity extraction by Claude Haiku. Updated every 12 hours.
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