Opinion mining and socializing networks

The context of this article is a larger, ongoing postdoctoral research that looks into the relationship between opinion mining - more precisely sentiment analysis - and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in February 2022. The postdoctoral research aims to analyze political speeches in the context of the war by using available sentiment analysis tools, the purpose being to discover the real emotions behind the speeches per se: are they indeed negative as they pretend to be, or are they rather neutral, in fact, or perhaps even positive. Furthermore, the political speeches selected, coming from official bodies and governments, are focused on the sanctions applied to Russia since invading Ukraine, so both context and sentiment should converge. This article has therefore meaning in the larger context of that research and it aims to offer a short exercise into using a sentiment analysis tool for investigating the presence on social media, this time, of the realities of this conflict. For this purpose, a couple of relevant key words were selected and they were analyzed using opinion mining in the framework of social media platforms and their numerous users. The article investigates the results of this search, discusses them and offers a personal perspective on the topic.