European Conscience- Sentiment analysis

A new method gauges changing national moods through social networks.

On the eve of the European Parliament elections on May 24-25, one could already sense a clash of opposing viewpoints among EU citizens over election-related issues. Between April 1 and April 30, websites in twelve countries racked up nearly 1.4m mentions related to Europe-wide concerns – an increase of 13.3% over the month of March, easily explained by the upcoming elections.

Less obvious was the simultaneous uptick in positive comments – from 35.4% to 41.9% — on the four issues at the heart of the public debate: austerity measures; employment and economic growth; the euro and fiscal union; and lastly, the brand-new banking union.

These findings emerge from a report by the start-up Voices from the Blogs – with the collaboration of East – which was released just before the elections. The study was based on an analysis of so-called “big data”, which crunches numbers from data sets so large and so complex that they cannot be analyzed using traditional methods.

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