A New Divide: Changes in Sentiment Polarity During Finnish Parliamentary Elections

Democracy is often shadowed by negativity and division rather than by the deliberative exchange of different ideas. Functioning democratic systems are built on interaction, and increasing sentiment polarity and a shift toward negativity on social media present a threat to such discussions. This study examines changes in sentiment polarity on two social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, during the campaigning periods of the Finnish parliamentary elections of 2019 and 2023. Target-based manual sentiment analysis was used to identify sentiments toward politicians and political groups in both the party leaders’ own posts and the comments they received. In addition to the traditional positive/neutral/negative coding, the study also adapts a category of negative sentiment toward other political entities to better illustrate the varying stances present in comment sections. The results indicate that sentiment polarity increased between the elections on Finnish political social media, while activity on both platforms also rose significantly. Politicians’ campaigning remained fairly nonnegative, while comments and replies experienced an increase in hostility and negativity. This was especially prevalent on Twitter, which became a largely negative platform. Facebook, on the other hand, appears to foster a more positive discussion climate. The great disparity between platforms in both usage and the volume of negative content would indicate that Twitter is indeed inherently negative. The target-based analysis revealed that negativity is focused on opposite ends of the left-right-political spectrum.