“Tweeto-Bomber” – Emotional Background of Tweets of Polish MPs

Conference: The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film (MediAsia2022)
Title: “Tweeto-Bomber” – Emotional Background of Tweets of Polish MPs
Stream: Political Communication and Satire
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Andrzej Meler, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland

Abstract:

An important level of political communication is emotionality. It goes without saying that the level of emotions in a political message plays a big role. Over the past decade, Twitter has become a wide range used channel of political communication. Often, both in the common and scientific discourse, it is claimed that the debate conducted there characterizes very emotional nature. In the presented research project, the emotionality of communication conducted by Polish parliamentarians on Twitter was checked. For this purpose, a method from the family of Natural Processing Language (NLP) was used: sentiment analysis based on a dictionary. The analysis was performed on nearly 1 million tweets (original tweets without retweets) collected in the period from January 2019 to June 2022. The results made it possible to map the emotional landscape created in polish MPs tweets both on dimensional scales with arousal and valence parameters as well as on discrete scales for 5 basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear, disgust, sadness). In addition, tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic are used to describe the differences in the emotional picture constructed by the ruling party and the opposition, providing a good illustration of how the emotional background of political communication can be coupled with the political interests of the party.

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