Emotions on Social Media: A Sentiment Analysis Approach Based on Twitter (X) Data on the Russian-Ukraine War

Abstract

Twitter (X) is an important tool that reflects the feelings and attitudes of the public. For this reason, in this study, especially when it comes to events that concern society, Twitter provides an opportunity to both follow the agenda and understand the reactions through instant sharing. Twitter is a social media platform that allows the public to convey their feelings, thoughts, and attitudes to the masses. Twitter provides the opportunity to stay up-to-date and understand reactions through instant posts, especially for social events. In this research, Twitter posts made with the Ukraine hashtag between March 1 and April 30, 2022, during the Russia-Ukraine War, were eliminated with the ‟war” filter, and the expressions were analyzed using the sentiment analysis method. Various URLs were eliminated, and research was carried out on ten thousand tweets. The tweets obtained were categorized as positive, negative, and neutral. Accordingly, the expressions containing positive, negative, and neutral emotions were analyzed by determining the emotional inferences of the words in the tweets with an artificial intelligence algorithm and then detailed by the researchers with content analysis. In this sense, this study becomes important in understanding how the masses express their reactions through emotional social media platforms and what their emotions are in this process. Therefore, this research can be a clue for the consequences of international war on the masses.