Twitter as a mirror - perspectives of common men and key personalities

摘要

Today society is increasingly going online and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are getting widely used for communications among people. Analysis of huge volumes of content contained in the implicit network on twitter can help in understanding people’s political beliefs more than ever before. This paper focuses on understanding not only the common man’s perspective towards different topics of importance but also the stances taken by prominent personalities around the same topics. Highly influential and popular personalities tweet about topics of high importance and are replied to or retweeted by people viewing the tweets. Such high volumes of data might not be very useful directly but could be very helpful in modelling and understanding people’s perceptions and issues. This paper explores topics such as economy, crime, health-care, citizenship, education, poverty in a specific geographical region in the year 2019 in order to get insights on the perception of the people around these topics. We also looked at the tweets of the prominent personalities around similar topics for gaining better insights as to how these topics are shaping their agenda. The paper does this by analyzing the tweets done in and around a given geographical region. The framework delivers interesting insights and can be easily extended into a tool to predict trending issues, common man’s perspectives and stances being taken by key groups as well as personalities who influence mass opinions.