On the Public Perception of Police Forces in Riot Events - The Role of Emotions in Three Major Social Networks During the 2017 G20 Riots

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study on the impact of emotions on information diffusion during a riot event. In particular, we analyze a data-set consisting of more than 750 thousand social media messages related to the 2017 G20 summit that have been extracted from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Because of the controversies surrounding police operations during violent protests, our analysis especially focuses on emotions conveyed in messages related to the local police. We found that a) negative emotions of high arousal (anger and fear) dominate in messages mentioning the police on all three social networks, b) emotional content was forwarded (retweeted) more often, regardless of the corresponding emotion valence, and c) in contrast to previous studies we found that emotions have a considerably larger impact on the retweeting behavior than the number of hashtags a message contains.