Analyzing online opinions and influence campaigns on blogs using BlogTracker

Abstract

Blogging has become an essential part of the new print media of the 21st century despite the emergence of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, with many news agencies, media outlets, journalists and users using this medium to write without any restriction on topics of choice or events that happen over the world. Although social networking sites have also become a hotbed where users share their views, it suffers from distraction when users try to air their views on topics that affect them due to character limitation, real-time toxic behavior, and content ownership rights. Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are sometimes used to drive traffic to blogs sites. The blogosphere, defined as the network of blogs, is growing at an exponential rate. Medium.com and WordPress.com are among the top blogging platforms, with WordPress leading the way as a top blogging platform and followed by other platforms like Medium, Hashnode, Tumblr, and blogger. Analyzing blog data helps understand the pulse of a society, know what resonates with a community, and recognize the grievances of a group, among other reasons. Since there is no character limit in blogs, unlike Twitter, blogs allow much depth in discourse, allowing it to be an effective platform for setting narratives. Blogs also provide a convenient platform to develop situational awareness during a socio-political crisis or humanitarian crisis in a conflict-torn region or a disaster-struck area. To address the difficulty of having a publicly accessible blog data analytical solution since solutions like Blogdex, among others, were either discontinued or made proprietary, we present BlogTracker. This tool helps users analyze public discussions with real-time data update capability and analyze narratives and emotion distribution on associated blog posts and trackers. This demonstration shows how the BlogTracker application analyses blog data with a case study about COVID-19.