Negative comments

Recently released research from the Warsaw University of Technology (Warsaw, Poland) suggests that people who comment online are emotional about the subject and the emotions are likely to be negative.

Also, the research shows that the more comments posted on a subject, the more likely the discussion will result in a deeply negative tone with among fewer commenters.

The study, “Negative emotions accelerating users activity in BBC Forum,” was released Nov. 25, 2010 and focused on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website. Specifically, the researchers “crawled all the discussions posted on the Religion and Ethics and World UK News message boards” between June 2005 and June 2009. They analyzed 97,946 threads with 257,227 posts written by 18,045 users.

STUDY HIGHLIGHTS (OR LOWLIGHTS?)
• A rapid and overwhelming development of the Internet enables gathering information on its users and their habits, spotting characteristic structures and users’ behavior.

• The recent development of automatic sentiment detection has enabled not only the investigation of emotions expressed by users but also made possible to link the emotions with user activity in certain media.

• Using the sentiment analysis methods, we have found the scheme of user’s emotional behavior in an Internet discussion forum of BBC. According to our analysis, the negative emotions are a motivation that incline forum participants to express their opinion (as well as emotion) writing a post.

• The active users are those characterized with negative emotions and they seem to be the key agents that sustain discussion in the thread.

• Finally, we have shown that negative emotions accelerate user’s local activity in the thread, which it is not true in the global case.