![]() For example, the #Auspol hashtag collected sentiments regarding other areas of Australian politics, whilst the #Refugees and #AsylumSeekers hashtags collected discussion on refugee crises in other parts of the world. Collecting almost 25,000 tweets from a period of only one week, a skim through the first few tweets in the data set revealed that many were unrelated to Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Unfortunately, the breadth of these topics resulted in an extremely large, and not particularly relevant data set. Due to the inevitably polarising nature of this kind of open discussion, expressions of outrage are as common as positive affirmation in the ‘platform where all voices can be heard’ (Twitter 2016).įor an issue as complex and controversial as the Australian refugee and asylum seeker influx, it can thus be argued that Twitter is the perfect platform from which to scrape and analyse direct, passionate public sentiment.įor my first scraping exercise, I used Google’s Twitter Archiver to collect tweets containing the hashtag #Refugees or #Asylumseekers or #Auspol. More than a profile picture or a one-line biography, identity in the Twittersphere is primarily constructed by the opinions, interests and ideas which one chooses to align with. The sidebar of a user’s Twitter browser displays a constantly updated list of trending topics (Twitter 2016).Įncompassing 313 million active users worldwide, it can be argued that the Twitter community is primarily comprised of people who value the right to express their opinion. A single user’s post has the power to spark a large-scale international debate in a number of minutes, gaining momentum every time the message is re-tweeted, engaged with or replied to by another user. ![]() Trending topic categories, hashtag and re-tweet functions all reinforce the platform’s emphasis on the rapid public dissemination of thought and opinion. Limiting posts to 140 characters or less, the platform encourages quick-fire exchanges of dialogue and conversation about a endlessly wide range of topics, such as news, current affairs, popular culture, humour, beliefs and personal matters. Functioning at its most basic level as an online messaging service, Twitter provides users from all over the world with a platform to communicate, engage with one another and express ideas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |