Analysis of Twitter and YouTube during USelections 2020

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter and YouTube data during the 2020 US elections to understand community dynamics, sentiment trends, and the influence of offline events on online discussions, revealing polarization and engagement patterns.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis combining social media volume, community structure, and sentiment analysis related to US election 2020, linking offline events to online reactions.

Findings

Retweet graph density increased near the election date.

Positive sentiment was higher towards Trump on Twitter.

YouTube sentiment was generally less positive than Twitter.

Abstract

The presidential elections in the United States on 3 November 2020 have caused extensive discussions on social media. A part of the content on US elections is organic, coming from users discussing their opinions of the candidates, political positions, or relevant content presented on television. Another significant part of the content generated originates from organized campaigns, both official and by astroturfing. In this study, we obtain approximately 17.5M tweets containing 3M users, based on prevalent hashtags related to US election 2020, as well as the related YouTube links, contained in the Twitter dataset, likes, dislikes and comments of the videos and conduct volume, sentiment and graph analysis on the communities formed. Particularly, we study the daily traffic per prevalent hashtags, plot the retweet graph from July to September 2020, show how its main connected component becomes denser in the period closer to the elections and highlight the two main entities ('Biden' and 'Trump'). Additionally, we gather the related YouTube links contained in the previous dataset and perform sentiment analysis. The results on sentiment analysis on the Twitter corpus and the YouTube metadata gathered, show the positive and negative sentiment for the two entities throughout this period. The results of sentiment analysis indicate that 45.7% express positive sentiment towards Trump in Twitter and 33.8% positive sentiment towards Biden, while 14.55% of users express positive sentiment in YouTube metadata gathered towards Trump and 8.7% positive sentiment towards Biden. Our analysis fill the gap between the connection of offline events and their consequences in social media by monitoring important events in real world and measuring public volume and sentiment before and after the event in social media.