Taking sides: Public Opinion over the Israel-Palestine Conflict in 2021

Abstract

The Israel-Palestine Conflict, one of the most enduring conflicts in history, dates back to the start of the 19 th century and has deeply rooted complex issues in politics, demography, religion, and other aspects, making it harder to attain resolve. To understand the global sentiment on the conflict, we devise an observational study to understand the friendliness of countries, agglomerated by the sentiments of tweets. We collect Twitter data using popular hashtags around and specific to the conflict containing opinions neutral or partial to the two parties. We use different sentiment analysis tools and methods to classify tweets into pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel, or neutral. This paper further describes the implementation of data mining methodologies to obtain insights into the global notion of the conflict and attempts to reason about countries' partiality toward a side in the conflict.2 https://www.vox.com/22440330/israel-palestine-gazaairstrikes-hamas-updates-2021 3 https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/israelipalestinian-conflict 4 https://backlinko.com/twitter-users

Lexicon-Based Sentiment Analysis in Behavioral Research

“…This approach has often been shown to be more accurate than lexicon-based approaches alone (e.g., Kotelnikova et al, 2021), but is also beyond the scope of the discussion here. Interested readers are encouraged to consult other related works in this journal (Lanovaz et al, 2020;Turgeon & Lanovaz, 2020) and leading Natural Language Processing conferences (Tang et al, 2019), as well as informative studies that incorporated either lexicon-based sentiment analysis (Yeung et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021) or machine-learning based sentiment analysis (Duong et al, 2020;Imtiaz et al, 2022).…”

IsamasRed: A Public Dataset Tracking Reddit Discussions on Israel-Hamas Conflict

“…The Israel-Palestine Conflict dates back to the start of 20th century, with unique historical, terrirorial, and political contexts. Imtiaz et al (2022) collect tweets regarding this conflict in 2021, and study the stances (pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel, or neutral) of the tweets towards the conflict, before the conflict intensified in 2023. However, few studies on social media analysis have focused on the conflict after the escalation in 2023.…”