Studying Online Political Behaviours as Rituals: A Study of Social Media Behaviour Regarding the CAA

Abstract

In a world of ever-increasing microblogs, the opinions, preferences, support, frustration, anger and other emotions of people regarding various events and individuals, surface in varied ways on social media. The purpose of this research is to find those hidden patterns in raw data, which can explain meaningful insights about its creation, the groups of people who created them and their sentiments which led to the generation of such data. Sentiment analysis has always been an effective methodology for discovering emotion and bias towards or against a situation, topic, thought or initiative and finding other meaningful insights from unstructured data. In this research, we attempted a type of document clustering wherein we attempted to classify the sentiments of the citizens of India as they micro-blogged their opinions, thoughts, views and ideas during the implication of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on the social networking site, Twitter. By analyzing the tweets of 13,000 twitter users during a specific timeline during which the discussion regarding the CAA was at its peak, we analyzed the sentiment of those twitter users by clustering their tweets (documents) into four sentiment groups with the help of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) which is an important tool for topic modelling in the domain of sentiment analysis. Using political ritual theory, the present paper examines the sentiments of people who tweeted during a protest in India. After the classification, our research also maps the online political behaviour of these 13,000 social media participants to the postulates of political ritual theory which is explained by previous research regarding the behaviour of physically co-existing political participants and also justifies this display of various sentiments regarding the CAA in the footsteps of political rituals.