Using sentiment analysis to predict opinion inversion in Tweets of political communication

Yogev Matalon,Dan Yamin,Ofir Magdaci,Adam Almozlino

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-86510-w

Abstract

Social media networks have become an essential tool for sharing information in political discourse. Recent studies examining opinion diffusion have highlighted that some users may invert a message's content before disseminating it, propagating a contrasting view relative to that of the original author. Using politically-oriented discourse related to Israel with focus on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we explored this Opinion Inversion (O.I.) phenomenon. From a corpus of approximately 716,000 relevant Tweets, we identified 7147 Source–Quote pairs. These Source–Quote pairs accounted for 69% of the total volume of the corpus. Using a Random Forest model based on the Natural Language Processing features of the Source text and user attributes, we could predict whether a Source will undergo O.I. upon retweet with an ROC-AUC of 0.83. We found that roughly 80% of the factors that explain O.I. are associated with the original message's sentiment towards the conflict. In addition, we identified pairs comprised of Quotes related to the domain while their Sources were unrelated to the domain. These Quotes, which accounted for 14% of the Source–Quote pairs, maintained similar sentiment levels as the Source. Our case study underscores that O.I. plays an important role in political communication on social media. Nevertheless, O.I. can be predicted in advance using simple artificial intelligence tools and that prediction might be used to optimize content propagation.

Highlights

Social media networks have become an essential tool for sharing information in political discourse
Social media networks have become a vital tool for sharing information and for influencing opinions and decision-making[1,2,3]
Social media platforms have proven to be highly influential in recent political events, such as the 2008 and 2016 U.S presidential elections[6,7,8], and the Arab Spring in the early 2010s9

Summary

Introduction

Social media networks have become an essential tool for sharing information in political discourse. Thanks to its attractive and straightforward platform of over 300 million monthly active users as of 2019, Twitter has become one of the most influential social media n etworks[10,11,12]. Political discourse concerning Israel is exceptionally active, attracting strong emotions, driving engagement on social media, and significantly impacting real-world events. DePaula et al.[26] found that Twitter user engagement in local government in the U.S is closely associated with symbolic and image-based content. These studies underscored that a message’s content is at the core of user engagement

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Conclusion