Estimating Sentiment in Social Media - a Case Study of the Migrant Caravans News on Twitter
Shravya Muttineni, Jing Wei Deng · 2021
Social media has empowered us to gain immense knowledge, criticism, and positivity from every corner of the world. Accessing social network sites like Twitter and Facebook has slowly become the norm, as people are now inclined towards looking for news and opinions in social media rather than reading traditional newspapers or watching TV news. There are many instances when a piece of news in these sites, irrespective of its reliability, has a significant impact on people's opinions towards it. In this work, we investigated some queried tweets of around 39 weeks of a sensational tragic issue of “Central American migrant caravans” and how the tweets played their critical roles in the overall sentiment on the twittersphere. We used Vader Sentiment Analysis to analyze the sentiment of each tweet before estimating the sentiment on Twitter toward this news. We show that such simple estimates can be very accurate.