A Novel Method of Generating Geospatial Intelligence from Social Media Posts of Political Leaders

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Twitter have been used by political leaders, heads of states, political parties, and their supporters to strategically influence public opinions. Leaders can post about a location, a state, a country, or even a region in their social media accounts, and the posts can immediately be viewed and reacted to by millions of their followers. The effect of social media posts by political leaders could be automatically measured by extracting, analyzing, and producing real-time geospatial intelligence for social scientists and researchers. This paper proposed a novel approach in automatically processing real-time social media messages of political leaders with artificial intelligence (AI)-based language detection, translation, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition (NER). This method automatically generates geospatial and location intelligence on both ESRI ArcGIS Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps. The proposed system was deployed from 1 January 2020 to 6 February 2022 to analyze 1.5 million tweets. During this 25-month period, 95K locations were successfully identified and mapped using data of 271,885 Twitter handles. With an overall 90% precision, recall, and F1 score, along with 97% accuracy, the proposed system reports the most accurate system to produce geospatial intelligence directly from live Twitter feeds of political leaders with AI.