Evolution of Sentiment in the Libyan Revolution

In the last ten days, Libya has changed, with effects on millions of Libyan’s lives. How do they feel about it? Until recently, such a question would have been laughably unanswerable. But the advent and recent development of social media has brought us to a position where we can not only sensibly ask such questions, but begin to answer them. We will do just that. It is, of course, only a beginning, and for several reasons. Here are two. First, social media is in its early days and is by no means universally accessible for the people of Libya or any other country. Second, when people are able to express themselves and do so using some medium, we still cannot be sure what they mean. Even if we knew each and every blogger, facebook-status updater, and tweeter personally, we still would be faced with a complicated interpretation problem. So there are challenges. But the new technologies also provide a historically unrivaled opportunity, an opportunity to take a look at what hundreds of thousands of people think about a developing political situation in realtime as it unfolds. And that is our goal. This is a preliminary report on results from an ongoing study of language use in the Arab spring. In the broader study, we are looking at both the language of leaders in public speeches, and the language of the populace in social media. Here we concentrate on just one country, Libya, and focus only on the language of the general public, as seen in tweets.