By Spinning
As we are reaching the final deciding matches of this year’s world cup, Switzerland (although sadly not in the World Cup anymore!) is actively following the rest of the games. We were wondering – how did the people in Switzerland react to the events up to now and what is their view on each team? As our Swiss Twitter Corpus has grown to a significant size (currently 3.6 million tweets and growing!), we decided to check what the Swiss Twitter Community can reveal about the current mood.
We first checked the distribution of tweets during the month of June and noticed a significant peak during the Swiss win against Serbia on June 22, as the graph below shows.
This made us wonder – were these tweets primarily positive or negative? How does the Swiss Twitter community feel about the Swiss team? To find out, we filtered tweets about the Swiss team and matches and ran a custom Sentiment Analysis tool in four languages (English, German, Swiss German, French) over it. The results are clear: the tweets are primarily positive!
But what do people think about the other teams? We thought it would be a good idea to filter out tweets about specific countries and see what sentiment the Twitter community expresses during game times. For the English team, we noticed a significant spike in positive tones about the team on July 3rd, which corresponds with their win against Colombia on the same day. On the other hand, tweets on the day of their game against Croatia were rather negative. Generally, the ratio of positive and negative tweets is however more even, compared to the tweets about the Swiss team.
Meanwhile, tweets about the Belgian team peaked during their game against Brazil, and again during their game against France, with the former showing a more divided tone and the latter a clearly positive tone. The game against Japan on the other hand, caused clear negative sentiment.
On the other hand, Swiss Twitter users appear to have quite a lot more sentiment about the French team! Opinions also look generally more divided. During their game against Australia, tweets were primarily negative. Interestingly, the amount of tweets peaked during the game against Belgium, with a rather positive sentiment.
From this juxtaposition of sentiments one thing is immediately clear: Switzerland feels most positively about their own team, as we can see in their primarily positive tweets. Swiss tweets about Belgium appear also primarily positive. Opinions differ mostly about the English and French matches, with the sentiment often more negative than positive.
Finding out about sentiment towards the World Cup, using our Twitter Corpus has been both fun and insightful and we plan to continue tracking tweets during the final matches. Are you interested to see, what other insights the corpus contains? Check out the official website of the Swiss Twitter Corpus or contact us for more information!