A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to generate customized search results as well as metrics, such as aggregated sentiment, counts of targets or sources or citations, or aggregated gross impressions or exposure, of social media content items over a social network while discriminating between the perspectives of individuals from the media and individuals not from the media. This approach can be used to generate search results and/or metrics including only media perspectives, or excluding media perspectives. More specifically, while social media content items are retrieved from corpus based on certain search criteria, for the purpose of providing search results or providing aggregated metrics, the search criteria can include a media or non-media filter, which is applied to the authors posting social media content to exclude or include certain authors meeting media/non-media criteria. For the application of a non-media filter, content from media authors can be excluded, or ranked below content from non-media authors. Similarly, for a media filter, content from non-media authors can be excluded, or ranked below content from media authors.