Shouting at the wall: Does negativity drive ideological cross-posting in Brexit Facebook comments?

Michael Bossetta, Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Chris Zimmerman, Duje Bonacci

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingPaper in conference proceedingpeer-review

Abstract

Using a novel methodological approach to measure emotions in Facebook comments, this Work in Progress (WIP) paper explores the relationship between negative feelings and ideological cross-posting behavior. Using the VoxPopuli data harvester, we collect over 770,000 public Facebook comments1 from the three major political campaign pages active during the Brexit referendum. After sorting users into ideological camps based on their reactions to campaign posts, we then examine their commenting patterns across ideological lines. Using three different methods of sentiment analysis, we identify negative and positive emotions and their fine-grained sub-categories in comments. The analysis reveals one quarter of all comments are cross-ideological posts, with Leave supporters overwhelmingly active in commenting on Remain posts. A comparison across the campaigns shows that Brexiteers are much more likely to express anger than Remainers.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages246-250
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)9781450363341
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018 Jul 18
Event9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: 2018 Jul 182018 Jul 20

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, SMSociety 2018
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period2018/07/182018/07/20

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Media Studies

Free keywords

  • ACM proceedings
  • Emotions
  • Facebook
  • Marketing
  • NLP
  • Political communication
  • Sentiment analysis

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