Understanding recession response by Twitter users: A text analysis approach

Abstract

Towards the end of 2022, economists around the world predicted that the symptoms of global economic recession were imminent and would be inevitable in 2023. Using sentiment analysis and thematic analysis, this research aims to grasp a better perspective on how the topic of recession is viewed and understood by Twitter users. The researcher crawled tweets by using Python programming language. According to the cleansed and filtered data that the researcher accessed, it is found that 46% of the data has neutral sentiment, 44% has negative sentiment, and 5% each has mixed and positive sentiment. It is also found that the topic of economic projection has become one of the most popular topics on Twitter, followed by the topics of cryptocurrency, politics, energy, and employment. In addition, the research concludes that the topic of cryptocurrency became the only topic that tended to have positive sentiment. Hence, in general the data is dominated by neutral and negative sentiment, and it implied that the topic of global economic recession is perceived negatively by Twitter users.