Sentiment Analysisof the

Occupy Movement

Michael Gerbush and Jackie Tsay

Twitter Sentiment Analysis

• Massive Language Corpus

• Realtime

• Well-Categorized and Searchable

Occupy Movement

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• Mindset of Protesters

• Public Reaction

• Gov’t Response

• Comparison to Arab Spring [BBHFLH ’11]

Anaylsis

• Twitter Stream API

• Filtered by Hashes: #ows, #occupy, etc.

• 9 day period

• LIWC

• Count Categories of Words

Emotions in Tweets

Emotions in Tweets

Emotions in Tweets

Emotions in LA

Emotions in LA

Stop Mayor @villaraigosa from evicting Occupy LA! Call 213-978-0721 to tell the Mayor to respect free speech #OccupyLA @ACLU_SoCal

Language Categories

Language Categories

Work Related Words

Contributing Words

Work:1. police, 42352. students, 11563. government, 9124. read, 8695. job, 867

Anger:1. protest, 18662. war, 7933. protesting, 5754. fight, 4635. shit, 455

Money:1. check, 19242. free, 13173. banks, 12754. money, 11665. bank, 792

• Limited Volume

• Few Geo Tags

• LIWC Too General

• Double Counting Words

• ex: ‘free’

• RTs Skew Sample

Issues

Further Research

• Collect Higher Volume of Data

• Account for Volume Fluctuations

• Domestic vs. International Sentiment

• Different Occupy Cities

• Protesters vs. Public vs. Media vs. Govt

• Data w/o RTs

Negative Emotion in US

Pos Emotion in US

Questions?