Comparing Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Platforms – Insights and Implications

The ubiquitous presence of social media is exerting its influence on several institutions in society by both positive and negative ways. In this context it behooves researchers to understand the validity of the influence of social media and what it means to the functionality of the institutions in society which include healthcare, politics, education, marriage, etc. This paper presents results and insights obtained from comparing sentiment analysis applied to Twitter and YouTube data on a set of topics. The focus of this study was to observe differences among sentiments expressed on different social media platforms. In other words, was there any influence generated by the social media platform on the individual’s expression of sentiments. Additionally, we also developed an app to encourage citizen data scientists to search for a topic relevant to their area of interest and obtain sentiment analysis for that topic.