Polarity-Based Sentiment Analysis of Georeferenced Tweets Related to the 2022 Twitter Acquisition

Abstract

Twitter, one of the most important social media platforms, has been in the headlines regularly since its acquisition by Elon Musk in October 2022. This acquisition has had a strong impact on the employees, functionality, and discourse on Twitter. So far, however, there has been no analysis that examines the perception of the acquisition by the users on the platform itself. For this purpose, in this paper, we use georeferenced Tweets from the US and classify them using a polarity-based sentiment analysis. We find that the number of Tweets about Twitter and Elon Musk has increased significantly, as have negative sentiments on the subject. Using a spatial hot spot analysis, we find distinct centres of discourse, but no clear evidence of their significant change over time. On the West Coast, however, we suspect the first signs of polarisation, which could be an important indication for the future development of discourse on Twitter.