Sentiment Analysis of Polarizing Topics in Social Media: News Site Readers' Comments on the Trayvon Martin Controversy
Abstract Purpose The authors apply topic sentiment analysis (several relatively new text analysis methods) to the study of public opinion as expressed in social media by comparing reactions to the Trayvon Martin controversy in spring 2012 by commenters on the partisan news websites the Huffington Post and Daily Caller. Methodology/approach Topic sentiment analysis is a text analysis method that estimates the polarity of sentiments across units of text within large text corpora (Lin He, 2009; Mei, Ling, Wondra, Su, Zhai, 2007) Findings We apply topic sentiment analysis to public opinion as expressed in social media by comparing reactions to the Trayvon Martin controversy in spring 2012 by commenters on the partisan news websites the Huffington Post and Daily Caller. Based on studies that depict contemporary news media as an "outrage industry" that incentivizes media personalities to be controversial and polarizing (Berry Sobieraj, 2014) we predict that high profile commentators will be more polarizing than other news personalities and topics. Originality/value Results of the topic sentiment analysis support this prediction and in so doing provide partial validation of the application of topic sentiment analysis to online opinion.