Preliminary findings of hostility towards MPs on Twitter using sentiment analysis

Abstract

This project, designed to track hostility to MPs, began in December 2016 and was partly inspired by the death of MP Jo Cox. This report, based on early results, was submitted to the Committee for Standards in Public Life as evidence for a review ordered by Prime Minister Theresa May into Intimidation of MPs following the June 2017 general election.

We captured tweets sent as @messages to British MPs from December 2016. The figures in this report relate to tweets sent between 18 March and 11 June. These @messages were then categorised as positive, neutral, disagree or hostile using bespoke machine learning software, trained using this specific dataset, to measure the emotion behind the messages people send to politicians. This is a more reliable method than simply searching for keywords, such as profanities. We defined hostility as insults aimed at the person rather than the action or policy.