Sentiment in Twitter events

TLDR

Twitter’s continuous stream of microblogging posts includes event‑related content, and analyzing these posts can reveal why certain events resonate with the public. This study aims to determine whether popular events on Twitter are linked to changes in sentiment strength. The authors examined one month of English tweets, measuring sentiment strength around the top 30 events identified by relative term‑usage spikes. Results show that popular events generally increase negative sentiment, while peaks of interest can elicit stronger positive sentiment, yet overall sentiment shifts are modest—about 1% on average—suggesting users mainly satisfy pre‑existing goals rather than react instinctively.

Abstract

The microblogging site Twitter generates a constant stream of communication, some of which concerns events of general interest. An analysis of Twitter may, therefore, give insights into why particular events resonate with the population. This article reports a study of a month of English Twitter posts, assessing whether popular events are typically associated with increases in sentiment strength, as seems intuitively likely. Using the top 30 events, determined by a measure of relative increase in (general) term usage, the results give strong evidence that popular events are normally associated with increases in negative sentiment strength and some evidence that peaks of interest in events have stronger positive sentiment than the time before the peak. It seems that many positive events, such as the Oscars, are capable of generating increased negative sentiment in reaction to them. Nevertheless, the surprisingly small average change in sentiment associated with popular events (typically 1% and only 6% for Tiger Woods' confessions) is consistent with events affording posters opportunities to satisfy pre-existing personal goals more often than eliciting instinctive reactions.