Paper 1

Brazilians Divided: Political Protests as Told by Twitter

Authors: Cassia de Souza Carvalho, Fabrcio Olivetti de Franca, Denise Hideko Goya, and Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado

Volume 27 (2016)

Abstract

After a erce presidential election campaign in 2014, the reelected president Dilma Rousse became a target of protests in 2015 asking for her impeachment. This sentiment of dissatisfaction was fomented by the tight results between the two favorite runners-up and the accusations of corruption in the media. Two main protests in March were organized and largely reported with the use of Social Networks like Twitter: one pro-government and other against it, separated by two days. In this work, we apply two supervised learning algorithms to automatically classify tweets during the protests and to perform an exploratory analysis to acquire insights of their inner divisions and their dynamics. Furthermore, we can identify a slightly di erent behavior from both parts: while the pro-government users criticized the opposing arguments prior the event, the group against the government generated attacked during di erent times, as a response to supporters of government.