Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extreme

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 19; no. 9; p. e0308919
• Main Authors: Bonacchi, Chiara, Witte, Jessica, Altaweel, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 04.09.2024; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Biology and Life Sciences; Computational linguistics; Computer and Information Sciences; Data mining; Decision-making; Dictionaries; Digital media; Extremism; Health aspects; Humans; Iron Age; Language processing; Machine learning; Methods; Natural language interfaces; Political aspects; Politics; Sentiment analysis; Social Media; Social networks; Social Sciences; Texts; United Kingdom; New York; United Kingdom > UK
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308919

This study assesses whether references to the ancient past in debates about political issues on social media over-represent negative and extreme views. Using precision-recall, we test the performance of three sentiment analysis methods (VADER, TextBlob and Flair Sentiment) on a corpus of 1,478,483 posts, comments and replies published on Brexit-themed Facebook pages between 2015 and 2017. Drawing on the results of VADER and manual coding, we demonstrate that: 1) texts not containing keywords relating to the Iron Age, Roman and medieval (IARM) past are mostly neutral and 2) texts with IARM keywords express more negative and extreme sentiment than those without keywords. Our findings show that mentions of the ancient past in political discourse on multi-sided issues on social media are likely to indicate the presence of hostile and polarised opinions.