Analysis of Comments of Users of Social Networks to Assess the Level of Social Tension

Abstract

Social networks provide a powerful reflection of the structure and dynamics of the modern society. One of the promising areas for using the results of social networks content analysis is to reveal the hidden patterns of the social processes development and factors that determine the changing moods in different social groups. In this paper, we propose an approach to measure social tension in certain regions of Russia based on the analysis of users’ posts in the social network Vkontakte (VK). We developed a program that obtains posts reflecting negative attitudes of VK users on popular social issues such as level of unemployment, corruption crimes, and inflation. We used this program to collect statistics about the number of such posts in certain periods and to analyze common information about users who post them.