A Big-Data Approach to Contemporary French Politics

Using social media data to reveal elements of French political discourse

Big Data

To date, we have collected over a hundred and fifty million tweets related to Macron, Marine Le Pen, Brexit, Covid-19, and many other noteworthy phenomena and individuals using a curated list of hashtags. 

Sentiment Analysis

We measure sentiment of the French and English tweets using machine-learning models that are trained on tweets for which we have manually determined the tone. 

Future Directions

We plan to investigate the role of disinformation and fake news in Twitter French discourse. Ultimately, we would like to conduct a cultural analysis that takes a longer and broader historical perspective, incorporating analysis of massive data into the established methods of inquiry in the field of cultural studies.