Impact of Context on Social Media Posts

This study examines the role of context in evaluating responses to social media posts online. Current sentiment analysis tools evaluate the content of posts without considering the broader context that the post comes from. Utilizing data from an in-person study, we examine differences between perceived sentiment evaluation when social media response posts are viewed in isolation and perceived sentiment evaluation when social media responses are viewed in the context of the original post. We find that evaluations of responses viewed in context change over 50% of the time. We validate this finding by utilizing simulated data to show the result is not simply a result of data manipulation or noisy data; furthermore, we explore results of this finding with current sent iment analysis tools, examining this result with subsets of our data with high and low kappa values.