Politics, Sentiment and Virality: A Large-Scale Multilingual Twitter Analysis in Greece, Spain and United Kingdom
Politics, Sentiment and Virality: A Large-Scale Multilingual Twitter Analysis in Greece, Spain and United Kingdom
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.4166108
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发表时间：
2022
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Dimosthenis Antypas;A. Preece;José Camacho-Collados
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文献类型：
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作者：
Dimosthenis Antypas;A. Preece;José Camacho-Collados
社交媒体在现代社会尤其是西方世界的政策制定中变得非常重要（例如，48%的欧洲人每天或几乎每天都使用社交媒体。Twitter等平台允许用户关注政治家，从而使公民更多地参与政治讨论。同样，政治家们利用Twitter表达他们的意见，就当前的主题进行辩论，并宣传他们的政治议程，以影响选民的行为。此前的研究表明，传达负面情绪的推文可能会被更频繁地转发。在本文中，我们试图分析来自不同国家的政治家的推文，并探讨他们的推文是否遵循相同的趋势。利用最先进的预先训练的语言模型，我们对从希腊、西班牙和英国议会成员（包括权力下放的政府）收集的数十万条推文进行了情感分析。我们通过系统地探索和分析不受欢迎的推文和不受欢迎的推文之间的差异来实现这一目标。我们的分析表明，政客们负面的推文传播得更广，特别是在最近的时期，并突出了情绪和受欢迎程度交叉的有趣趋势。
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies especially in the western world (e.g., 48% of Europeans use social media every day or almost every day). Platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agenda aiming to influence voter behaviour. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets of politicians from di ff erent countries and explore whether their tweets follow the same trend. Utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models we performed sentiment analysis on hundreds of thousands of tweets collected from members of parliament of Greece, Spain and United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the di ff erences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians’ negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting trends in the intersection of sentiment and popularity.