What’s in a tweet?: twitter’s impact on public opinion and EU foreign affairs

This paper uses text mining and sentiment analysis of Twitter posts to explore the EU’s diplomatic communication practices and to measure public opinion on foreign affairs. Building on an original dataset of almost one million tweets from the past five years, this analysis reveals differences in pub...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Schmitt, Lewin
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/49005
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49005
http://dx.doi.org/10.24241/docCIDOB.2021.11
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:EU foreign policy
Twitter diplomacy
Text mining
Public opinion
Descripción
Sumario:This paper uses text mining and sentiment analysis of Twitter posts to explore the EU’s diplomatic communication practices and to measure public opinion on foreign affairs. Building on an original dataset of almost one million tweets from the past five years, this analysis reveals differences in public perceptions of the EU’s relationship with China, India and Russia. Attitudes are most positive in the case of the EU–India relationship, followed by EU–China and EU–Russia. Furthermore, the paper examines hundreds of official EU Twitter accounts, specifically their communications on diplomatic relations with these countries. A main finding is that the EU talks about its diplomatic relations in more positive terms than the wider public, though this verbal politeness effect is less pronounced in the case of EU–Russia relations.