Internet Public Opinion on Media Report Semantics of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan

Abstract

On August 2, 2022, the U.S. House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China expressed strong dissatisfaction, triggering the 4th Taiwan Strait Crisis. We investigated the differences in the frameworks constructed by the news media and the public opinion about the “event of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan”. Semantics and “public opinions” associated with the report contents of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan were analyzed using the online news media of major newspapers in Taiwan, as well as the social media PTT Gossiping. The Python programming language was used for web crawling, and the word frequency database snowNLP in Python was adopted as a sentiment analysis tool. The research results showed that the emphasis of different media in different periods was slightly different. The topics of netizens in PTT Gossiping were often affected by the topic framework of the news media. However, the public developed their discussion topics. News media reports did not have a framing effect on the emotional changes of common words used by the public about the issues.