Automated content analysis of online political communication

Petchler, Ross; González‐Bailón, Sandra

doi:10.4337/9781782548768.00037

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(38 reference statements)

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“…We coded the incidence of several key words in English and Arabic within the top 5,000 most re-tweeted tweets each month as a proxy for the prevalence of particular identity frames (Petchler and Gonzalez-Bailon, 2014). We employed a simple lexicon approach, searching in English and Arabic for the terms “regime” (a term often used by those sympathetic with the Syrian opposition, which resonates well with the discourse of the other Arab uprising cases), “donate/donation” (a term which we determined inductively captures a wide swathe of the public fundraising efforts on behalf of the Syrian opposition), and “jihad” (a term which captures at least some of the Islamist framing of the conflict).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

Lynch

Freelon

Aday

2014

Research & Politics

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Between December 2010 and March 2011 a local Tunisian protest against an aging dictator spread to Egypt and then to Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria and at a lower intensity to several other countries (Lynch, 2012). These protests involved a remarkable number of commonalities in slogans, timing, and methods, and self-conscious framing of events as a common "Arab" narrative. Yemeni protestors, for instance, quickly adopted Egyptian slogans or took heart from Libyan opposition advances. This Arab uprising represents a critical case for theories of the international diffusion of protest movements and regime change (Bunce and Wolchik 2011; Hale, 2013; Solingen, 2012; Zhukov and Stewart, 2013). The early Syrian uprising modeled itself after counterparts across the region, employing similar rhetorical frames, attempting to seize public places without arms, presenting a civic, non-sectarian and non-Islamist face at home and abroad, and in some cases hoping to attract a NATO intervention like Libya's. Many likely expected Bashar al-Asad's regime to succumb to a similar fate as those of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali (Anden-Papadopolous and Pantti, 2013; Leenders, 2012; Leenders and Heydemann, 2012). As Syria's conflict evolved towards a mixture of protest and civil war, while uprisings in Arab Spring leaders such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen themselves struggled, Syria became far more of a polarizing issue with a higher degree of sectarian rather than pan-Arab identity narratives. How did Syria's popular uprising of 2011 fit within the broader regional wave of Arab uprisings in early 2011, commonly termed the "Arab Spring"? Existing theories of protest diffusion and regime change cascades emphasize the importance of geographic proximity. The pattern of uprisings in Arab countries in early 2011 only partially fits

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

Lynch

Freelon

Aday

2014

Research & Politics

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“…Considering the anti-extradition movement had lasted for more than 6 months, with numerous petitions, rallies and sit-ins taking place, often at the same time, involving a wide range of stakeholders, it is expected that tweets pertaining to the movement would be sparse and messy. In such cases, topic modelling is particularly useful when we want to explore the texts with no clear preconceptions of topics that are discussed in a certain communication environment (Petchler and González-Bailón, 2015). 47 Drawing upon these results, it could be deduced that English tweets posted from abroad revolved primarily around three topics, namely, police brutality, China's influence as well as various protest events initiated by the protestors.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Would violent tactics cost a democratic movement its international support? A critical examination of Hong Kong's anti-ELAB movement using sentiment analysis and topic modelling

Lui

2022

Japanese Journal of Political Science

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This paper aims to address an important yet under-studied issue – how does violence from the side of the protestors affect overseas support for a democratic movement? The importance of this question is twofold. First, while violence and radicalization are not exactly unfamiliar territories for scholars of contentious politics, they do not receive as much attention when their effects spill beyond the domestic arenas. Second, this study seeks to examine international solidarity with democratic movements at the civil society level, which differs substantially from the conventional elite-centric approach when it comes to the intersection between democratization and international relations. Against this backdrop, this paper considers the relationship between violent tactics employed by the protestors during the anti-extradition movement and the sentiment expressed by people elsewhere towards the protests. To this end, a total of 9,659,770 tweets were extracted using Twitter Application Programming Interface during the period of 1 June 2019–31 January 2020. Leveraging computational methods such as topic modelling and sentiment analysis, findings in this paper demonstrate that a majority of foreign Twitter users were supportive of the protestors while held relatively negative sentiments against the government as well as the police. In addition, this study reveals that, broadly speaking, violence might cost a democratic movement by its international support, but could also garner more attention at times. Despite its restricted scope, this paper hopefully will shed some useful light on the dynamics underlying international solidarity for a democratic movement abroad as well as the complex mechanisms of interactions between people who protest at home and those who observe from overseas.

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“…1 In the simplest case, sentiment has a binary classification: positive or negative, but it can be extended to multiple dimensions (Haselmayer and Jenny, 2017). Another approach for sentiment analysis is the supervised learning technique which is broadly used for emotion classification purposes (Petchler and González-Bailón, 2015). In this advanced method, model or learner is first trained with some sample data which have already been assigned to the categories, and then the model is tested by providing some sample data as input to the model for doing classification based on the prior training given to it.…”

Section: Psycho-sociological Foundations Of Emotive Communication In mentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Communication and Participation in Politics

Szabó¹

2020

Intersections

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Automated content analysis of online political communication

Cited by 8 publications

References 52 publications

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

Would violent tactics cost a democratic movement its international support? A critical examination of Hong Kong's anti-ELAB movement using sentiment analysis and topic modelling

Emotional Communication and Participation in Politics

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