Bonacchi, Chiara;
Witte, Jessica;
Altaweel, Mark;
(2024)
Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extreme.
PLoS ONE
, 19
(9)
, Article e0308919. 10.1371/journal.pone.0308919.
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Political uses of the ancient past on social media are predominantly negative and extreme |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0308919 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308919 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright: © 2024 Bonacchi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology > Institute of Archaeology Gordon Square |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10196657 |
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