Digital War
Today at 8AM a cease fire has been declared in operation Protective Edge. The public discussion over the operation, however, will stay with us for a long time. Public opinion is one of the key influence factors on countries and people behavior. In the digital and social networks world, that opinion might very rapidly turn itself into large-scale action (the 'Arab Spring', for example) , thus better understanding of it might shed some light on future trends and phenomena which are about to take place. During armed conflicts, in addition to the traditional battle front, another front takes place in cyberspace, particularly if Israel is involved. The MasterMineDS office is based in Tel Aviv. From here, a quick look at Facebook provides the common Israeli sense of solidarity with the military operation, proudly showing Israeli soldiers finding another rocket launcher or assault tunnel on one hand, and mutually helping each other at the home front between missile attack sirens, on the other hand. However, while this is the situation in Israel, a brief view on TV channels, as well as news websites from all around the globe, actually shows very severe reactions, emotions and opinions against Israel.
Twitter is Left Behind
Israelis love social networks. They are highly active on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram; WhatsApp and Viber were invented in Israel and are also very popular among its citizens. But when it comes to Twitter, the amount of tweets per citizen is fairly low compared to the rest of the world, and it seems Twitter is being left behind in the Israeli arena. With that in mind, we decided to research the global public opinion regarding operation Protective Edge as it reflects these days in Twitter, and by using sentiment analysis techniques find out whether Israel is regarded as a country who defends itself, or as an aggressor.
MasterMineDS's Part – Tweet sentiment analysis
- Level of interest by country: What portion of the Twitter conversations are related to the Israel-Gaza operation in every country?
- Tweet sentiments: sentiment analysis will allow us to find the ratio of tweets supporting Israel's activity to non-supporters in every country.
- Anomalies: Who are the anomalous users in different regions and what are they saying?
After setting up a server to collect millions of tweets per day, we started analyzing the data. The analysis is based on roughly 17,500 daily Protective Edge related tweets, gathered for over a week on July 25-July 31, 2014, over 120,000 tweets in total. Total tweeter conversations during that period stood on roughly 10,000,000 tweets per day. Those numbers represent only a portion of the entire tweets database, due to capacity limits embedded in Twitter's api. Nevertheless, the gathered sample consistently represents trends and proportion between countries.
First Goal: Level of Interest by Country
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