Public Sentiment and Critical Framing in Social Media Content During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign

Abstract

By being embedded in everyday life, social networking sites (SNSs) have altered the way campaign politics are understood and engaged with by politicians and citizens alike. However, the actual content of social media has remained a vast but somewhat amorphous and understudied entity. The study reported here examines public sentiment as it was expressed in just over 1.42 million social media units on Facebook and Twitter to provide broad insights into dominant topics and themes that were prevalent in the 2012 U.S. election campaign online. Key findings include the fact that contrary to what one might expect, neither presidential candidate was framed in an overly critical manner in his opponent’s Facebook space nor on Twitter’s dedicated nonpartisan election page. Beyond this, similarities and divergences in sentiment across social media spaces are observed that allow for a better understanding of what is being communicated in political social media.

Leveraging Behavioral and Social Information for Weakly Supervised Collective Classification of Political Discourse on Twitter

“…the Vancouver riots (Burch et al, 2015) and the Egyptian protests (Harlow and Johnson, 2011;Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). Others have covered framing and sentiment analysis of opponents (Groshek and Al-Rawi, 2013) and network agenda modeling (Vargo et al, 2014) in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Jang and Hart (2015) studied frames used by the general population specific to global warming.…”

Facebook and virtual nationhood: social media and the Arab Canadians community

“…In this study, Jaccard's coefficient was used to accurately calculate the associations among the words and phrases by providing a spatial map of the conceptual distances between regularly occurring keywords and phrases. The coefficient ranges between 0.0 for no co-occurrence and 1.0 for complete co-occurrence (Tan et al 2006;Groshek and Al-Rawi 2013;Al-Rawi 2015b). Finally, the analysis of the Facebook page content through sentiment analysis was complemented by an interview with the Facebook page administrator.…”

Ideological Phrase Indicators for Classification of Political Discourse Framing on Twitter

“…Political and social science works have studied the role of Twitter and framing in molding public opinion of events and issues (Burch et al, 2015;Harlow and Johnson, 2011;Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013;Jang and Hart, 2015), as well as sentiment analysis and network agenda modeling of the 2012 U.S. presidential election (Groshek and Al-Rawi, 2013). Boydstun et al (2014) composed a Policy Frames Codebook for use in labeling general, issue-independent frames of longer texts.…”