Abstract
Twitter is, among other social-media platforms, a service, which is said to have an impact on the public discourse and communication in the society. With the unique feature of “retweeting,” Twitter is an ideal platform for users to spread information. Besides their content and intended use, Twitter messages (“tweets”) often convey pertinent information about their author’s sentiment. In this paper, we examine whether sentiment occurring in politically relevant tweets has an effect on their retweetability (i.e., how often these tweets will be retweeted). Based on a data set of approximately 65,000 tweets, we find a positive relationship between the quantity of words indicating affective dimensions including positive and negative emotions associated with certain political parties or politicians in tweets and their retweet rate. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results.
Recommended Citation
Stieglitz, Stefan and Dang-Xuan, Linh, "The Role of Sentiment in Information Propagation on Twitter – An Empirical Analysis of Affective Dimensions in Political Tweets" (2011). ACIS 2011 Proceedings. 38.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2011/38