Election Trolling: Analyzing Sentiment in Tweets During Pakistan Elections 2013

The use of Twitter as a discussion platform for political issues has led researchers to study its role in predicting election outcomes. This work studies a much neglected aspect of politics on Twitter namely “election trolling” whereby supporters of different political parties attack each other during election campaigns. We also propose a novel strategy to detect terms that are usually not associated with sentiment but are introduced by supporters of political parties to attack the opposing party. We demonstrate a lack of political maturity as evidenced through high percentage of political attacks in a developing region such as Pakistan.