Understanding Public Sentiment Towards a Public Rally Using Text and Social Media Analytic

Abstract

The use of social media for analysing behaviours and trends of the public is a growing research area. In 2021, the #LAWAN social movement emerged in Malaysia as a result of discontentment of the people towards the government. This study intends to study and discover the public perception and sentiment towards the #LAWAN rally. The investigation also questions whether is the civil society supportive of such social movement and rally, especially when rally, protests and demonstration are traditionally and often seen as a negative and non-constructive approach in the country. Tweets with the hashtag #LAWAN over a day on and before the rally day on 31st July 2021 have been collected and analysed. Sentiment analysis helped to identify the public sentiments towards the rally, and topic modelling helped to discover common topics from the 5000+ tweets scrapped from the social media.