Big Players: Emotion in Twitter Communities Tweeting About Global Warming

Abstract

This work considers exceptionally active users on Twitter, the “big players,” and analyzes the correlation between the level of emotion these users express in communications tagged with the hashtag #globalwarming and the levels expressed by the Twitter community as a whole. Using an emotion lexicon incorporating four of the eight base human emotions according to Plutchik: anger, fear, sadness, and joy, we identify to what extent a small group of these big players may predict the emotion expressed by their online community in their tweets.