Haters vs. lovers on Facebook

Abstract

This paper tries to answer what is the dominant sentiment of comments that users leave on the Facebook fan pages of politicians in power. To answer this question, first the auto-code sentiment analysis of nearly 44,000 comments posted on the Facebook fan page of former US president Barack Obama was conducted. Secondly, content analysis was conducted on 2,411 comments posted on former Croatian president Ivo Josipović’s Facebook fan page. The results of auto-code sentiment analysis showed that examined comments in Obama’s case were mostly neutral and positive, while negative sentiment was the least represented in Obama’s case. The results of content analysis in the Croatian case revealed that the dominant sentiment of all comments was also positive. Finally, it was revealed that the response rate in both cases was zero, what tells us that Obama and Josipović used Facebook only for top-down communication, while the interactive potential of Facebook was neglected.