Enthusiasm and support: alternative sentiment classification for social movements on social media

Abstract

We present a novel sentiment classifier particularly designed for modeling and analyzing social movements; capturing levels of support (supportive versus non-supportive) and degrees of enthusiasm (enthusiastic versus passive). The resulting computational solution can help organizations involved with social causes to disseminate messages in a more informed and effective fashion; potentially leading to greater impact. Our findings suggest that enthusiastic and supportive tweets are more prevalent in tweets about social causes than other types of tweets on Twitter.