[sig-reduction]

I think OP has a good point. Although language if fuzzy, so are "binary" signals once you drill down to the physical layer. The fuzziness of language goes away if you allow yourself to assume an idealized language embedding model. Similar ideas are in an epsilon ball around the embedding of some concrete linguistic instantiation of the idea.

An example of a binary signal: "It is unambiguously true that a lab leak did not occur in Wuhan." The spread of this binary signal could be measured using the technique described above. A BERT embedding may suffice.

The channels are just tweets, DMs, and Vox articles.