An analysis of emotions and the prominence of positivity in #BlackLivesMatter tweets.

ABSTRACT: Emotions are a central driving force of activism; they motivate participation in movements and encourage sustained involvement. We use natural language processing techniques to analyze emotions expressed or solicited in tweets about 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Traditional off-the-shelf emotion analysis tools often fail to generalize to new datasets and are unable to adapt to how social movements can raise new ideas and perspectives in short time spans. Instead, we use a few-shot domain adaptation approach for measuring emotions perceived in this specific domain: tweets about protests in May 2020 following the death of George Floyd. While our analysis identifies high levels of expressed anger and disgust across overall posts, it additionally reveals the prominence of positive emotions

SUBMITTER: Field A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9436370 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature