Patrick Gordon’s research while affiliated with College of Cape Town and other places

In this study, we compared the social media net sentiment of one policy with two names. Specifically, we analyzed Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to understand how social media users engaged with each term on social media from March 2010 to March 2017. The net sentiment was measured with a sample of over 50 million micro-blogs, and the analysis was done using a combination of digital instruments and human validation. We found a significant difference between the social media engagement and sentiment of both terms, with the ACA performing significantly better than Obamacare, despite Obamacare’s higher conversation volume. With the ACA having an average of 26% less negative sentiment than Obamacare, the findings of this study emphasize the need to be careful when attaching nicknames to public policy. The findings also have implications for policymakers and politicians.

The measurement of online sentiment is a developing field in social science and big data research. The methodology from this study provides an analysis of online sentiment using a unique combination of NLP and human validation techniques in order to create net sentiment scores and categorise topics of online conversation. The study focused on measuring the online sentiment of South Africa's major banks (covering almost the entire retail banking industry) over a 12-month period. Through this methodology, firms are able to track shifts in online sentiment (including extreme firestorms) as well as to monitor relevant conversation topics. To date, no published methodology combines the use of big data NLP and human validation in such a structured way. • Microsampling for manual validation of sentiment analysis (both qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to obtain the most accurate results) • Sentiment measurement • Sentiment map