Sentiments & Coups

Problem

In the wake of Bolivia’s 2019 general elections, the Organization of American States (OAS) claimed in its report that the socialist party of Evo Morales was rigging the election. As a result, protests from the opposing party erupted, eventually leading to a coup supported by the police and military. Concern over the US government’s and US media’s actions and influence presented an opportunity to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis between U.S. media articles and Twitter trends throughout this timeframe to investigate correlations between topics and sentiments.

solution

To study online opinion in the United States, 50,000 tweets were retrieved from the Academic Twitter API. Tweets were collected from the month of the 2019 crisis to the month before the 2020 election (09/10/2019 - 09/18/2020). Tweets were collected in English only and within the US geolocation when possible. The search query string included the ruleset of excluding retweets and only including tweets that matched two keywords from the following list: Bolivia, coup, democracy, Evo, Morales, Anez, Jeanine.
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Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we discovered esoteric topics such as Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk, lithium, and an indication of skepticism with media within the United States. The sentiment analysis revealed a great degree of mixed sentiments, with 55% of tweets being negative. This high percentage of negativity reflected the polarized opinions and intense debate surrounding the political situation in Bolivia. Additionally, the social network analysis identified key influencers and the most retweeted messages, shedding light on how information and opinions were disseminated and amplified across the platform. This comprehensive analysis provided valuable insights into the intersection of social media discourse, public opinion, and geopolitical events.