2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)

An Analysis of Sentiments on Facebook during the

2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Saud Alashri Srinivasa Srivatsav Kandala Vikash Bajaj
CIDSE Decision Theater Network CIDSE
Arizona State University Arizona State University Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona Tempe, Arizona Tempe, Arizona
salashri@asu.edu sskandal@asu.edu vbajaj2@asu.edu

Roopek Ravi Kendra L. Smith Kevin C. Desouza

CIDSE College of Public Service School of Public Affairs
Arizona State University & Community Solutions Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona Arizona State University Phoenix, Arizona
rravi5@asu.edu Phoenix, Arizona kev.desouza@gmail.com
klsmit40@asu.edu

Abstract—Social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook and
Twitter, are important spaces for political engagement. SNS have
become common elements in political participation, campaigns,
and elections. However, little is known about the dynamics
between candidate posts and commentator sentiment in response
to those posts on SNS. This study enriches computational
political science by studying the 2016 U.S. elections and how
candidates and commentators engage on Facebook. This paper
also examines how online activity might be connected to
offline activity and vice versa. We extracted 9,700 Facebook
posts by five presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, Donald
Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich) from
their official Facebook pages and 12,050,595 comments on those
posts. We employed topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and
trends detection using wavelet transforms to discover topics,
trends, and reactions. Our findings suggest that Republican
candidates are more likely to share information on controversial
events that have taken place during the election cycle, while
Democratic candidates focus on social policy issues. As
expected, commentators on Republican candidate pages express
negative sentiments toward current public policies as they
seldom support decisions made by the Obama administration,
while commentators on democratic candidate pages are more
likely to express support for continuation or advancement
of existing policies. However, the significance (strong/weak)
and nature (positive/negative) of sentiments varied between
candidates within political parties based on perceived credibility
of the candidate’s degree of credibility on a given issue.
Additionally, we explored correlation between online trends of
comments/sentiment and offline events. When analyzing the
trend patterns, we found that changes in online trends are
driven by three factors: 1) popular post, 2) offline debates, and
3) candidates dropping out of the race.
Keywords—Social Networking Sites, Facebook, US Elections,
Time Series Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Topic Inference.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The world of politics has progressed to a new level of
personalized engagement between candidates and the voting
IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2016, August 18-21 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA
978-1-5090-2846-7/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
public thanks to the Internet and social networking sites (SNS).
SNS such as Facebook and Twitter provide an opportunity for
individuals to learn information, share information, communi-
cate with networks, and develop new networks, all of which
create a new, personalized form of political engagement. The
presidential election of 2008 was the first time in U.S. history
that a candidate (President Obama) utilized social media as
a campaign strategy. In addition to his own campaign web-
site (barackobama.com), President Obama used an extensive
SNS that included profiles on such platforms as Facebook,
Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Digg, Eons,
BlackPlanet, AsianAve, Faithbase, and several others. He used
those online communities to complement what was happening
offline, and vice versa [1].
President Obama’s success shed light on the possibilities
of social media in U.S. elections and set a trend for fu-
ture candidates to emulate; that trend goes beyond the U.S.
Narenda Modi, Prime Minister of India, was the second most
“liked” politician on Facebook, only behind President Obama.
SNS are important for campaigning because of their diverse
user demographics. According to the Pew Research Center
(2014), 74% of Internet users use SNS with little variation
across education, income, gender, and ages 18-49 [2]. SNS
also provide a unique opportunity for politicians to connect
with youth voters; a group that historically has low political
participation. According to the Pew Research Center (2016),
youth voters (or Millennials) were most likely to get their
political news from SNS [3].
The use of SNS for elections has changed drastically from
2008 to 2016. Unlike the 2008 U.S. elections where President
Obama leveraged SNS as a competitive weapon, during the
2016 elections all candidates have exploited SNS as a critical
element of their campaign. The focus of our paper is to
investigate the following: 1) variations in activity between

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the candidates on Facebook, 2) the dynamics of activity by
candidates and their commentators on Facebook, and 3) how
online activity might be correlated to offline activity and
events.
We are particularly interested in understanding how candi-
dates get their message out, how commentators react to them,
and what factors explain variations in activities by candidates
and their commentators on Facebook.
Moreover, we want to examine if commentators’ reactions,
in terms of volume and sentiment, track in the same direction.
To do so, we conducted an analysis of interactivity patterns
between commentators and the official Facebook pages of the
top five presidential candidates: Hillary R. Clinton (Clinton),
Donald Trump (Trump), Bernie Sanders (Sanders), Ted Cruz
(Cruz), and John R. Kasich (Kasich).
Our approach in this paper can be summarized as: topic
inference for candidates’ posts, sentiment analysis of com-
mentators’ comments, trends detection of oblique cumulative
curves of comments and sentiment using wavelet transforms.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II is
a literature review on SNS and elections. The methodology
of this study is described in Section III. Section IV presents
the experimental results and the qualitative analysis. The final
section concludes the paper and discusses future work.
II. L ITERATURE R EVIEW
The pervasiveness of SNS in everyday life changes how
the public sphere is conceptualized and utilized [4]. Enli and
Skogerbø [5] contend that SNS enables the personalization of
politics by which candidates and citizens are able to connect in
new and different ways, which create different forms of politi-
cal participation. Bennett [6] contends that the personalization
of political participation “. . . is importantly channeled through
often dense social networks over which people can share their
own stories and concerns through the pervasive use of social
technology which enables individuals to become important
catalysts of collective action processes as they activate their
own social networks”(p. 22).
SNS signal a degree of relevance and importance to the
complementary relationships between online and offline activ-
ities. The uprising of young Arabs in (mainly) Tunisia and
Egypt known as the Arab Spring in 2011 is a recent example
of SNS working as a conduit for collective action. The uprising
was the result of many causes steeped in opposition over
political oppression; SNS played a central role in shaping
protests and political debates surrounding the issue through
the pushing of information to the masses, which eventually
led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Howard
et al. [7] found that the political conversations being had
about the uprising were happening mostly online and amongst
young, urban, and well-educated individuals who were mostly
women. Additionally, spikes in online conversations were
often preceded by major offline events and that SNS helped to
spread information across borders. Perhaps one of the biggest
signs of SNS saturation is that tweets grew from 2,300 to
796
230,000 the week before President Mubarak’s resignation with
the majority of tweets (225,000) being sent from outside of
the country [7].
Offline user features such as demographic characteristics
like income, gender, and education complement online par-
ticipation. For instance, individuals with higher education and
income attainment are more likely to engage in civic activities
due to more knowledge and fewer barriers to participation.
Gender accounts for slight differences whereas men are more
active in politics while women are equally or more active in
community activities and grassroots movements [8]. Online
features of participation include offline characteristics such
as network, size, strength, and diversity that all combine to
impact participation. For instance, scholars have found that
Internet usage can strengthen existing interpersonal ties as well
as create new networks that continue offline [9], [10]. Williams
and Gulati [11] concluded that online activity is an indicator
(albeit a very important one) along with other indicators such
as media coverage, expenditures, and organizing activities for
success.
Further, the type of SNS used can be an indicator of
participation. Williams and Gulati [12] note that Facebook is
the leading SNS for political campaigning because it offers
candidates an additional method of mobilizing voters. Its
ubiquity and high volume of younger users, is particularly
useful and valuable. Further, Facebook is unique because of its
features such as the “newsfeed” and “wall” which allow users’
thoughts and opinions to be displayed for their networks,
which is likely to spur more interaction [13]. Williams and
Gulati [11] assert that the number of Facebook supporters may
be a valid predictor of electoral success.
Studies that have utilized various methods of analysis on the
relationship between candidates, election outcomes, and online
activity to understand political support have only arrived at
tentative findings. Véronis [14] found that counting a candi-
date’s mentions can be a better predictor of election success
over election polls. Robertson et al. [15] found in a study
of Facebook wall-commentators during the 2008 election that
most individuals that posted a comment on a candidate’s page
usually only did so once and that President Obama received
the most attention in political dialogues during the campaign.
For individuals that posted on multiple candidates’ Facebook
wall, they tended to be more verbose, post more often, provide
more outside links, direct comments to others rather than about
themselves, and refer to the candidates directly and more often.
Standberg [16] studied SNS (Twitter and Facebook) in Fin-
land to understand the use of social media in the 2011 election
cycle. The study concluded that differences in social media had
much to do with independent variables such as age, household
income, gender, political interest, and Internet use. Further,
candidates used social media as an “add-on” to increase
mobilization. Hong and Nadler [17] found a strong relationship
between the numbers of times a politician is mentioned by
traditional media with the number of mentions they get on
Twitter. Although they found no statistical significance, they
did highlight the potential for a candidates’ Twitter activity to
increase the traditional media mentions.
O’Connor et al. [18] used sentiment analysis to measure
consumer confidence (consumers’ feeling about health of
economy and their finances) and political opinion over a
year. They found correlations to sentiment word frequencies
in Twitter messages which revealed the potential of utilizing
text streams from social media as a substitute to traditional
polling. However, there should be some caution exercised
when considering social media as an indicator. Social media
manipulation does happen by candidates, propagandist, or
interest groups and can be a significant challenge to prediction
and understanding [19].
Despite the possibilities for manipulation, SNS have a great
opportunity to help us learn more about public deliberation.
Tumasjan et al. [20] studied the 2009 German federal election
to investigate Twitter usage and whether online messages
match offline public sentiment. They found that the number
of mentions on Twitter reflect election results. Gibson and
McAllister [21] found in the 2004 Australian national elections
that the online component of a campaign had a strong positive
impact on candidate’s share of the votes and was integral for
victory. They concluded that the web is a major vote attractor
for candidates but questioned what aspects of a candidate’s
web presence actually converts interest into votes. Effing et
al. [1] studied social media use in the Netherlands and found
that during the 2010 national elections, candidates with higher
social media engagement got the most votes but this was not
the same at the local level in 2010/2011.
The unique contribution of this paper can be found in 1)
the study of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections where social
media use is at all time high and all candidates are active
on SNS and, 2) the examination of alignment between offline
events and online activities. Moreover, we hope to contribute
to knowledge on computational political science both with
our findings as well as our methodological approach (e.g.
the use of topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and wavelet
transforms).
III. M ETHODOLOGY
Our approach can be summarized as follows:
• Data extraction from candidates Facebook pages.
• Infer latent topics from candidates posts and assign each
post to its topic.
• Analyze sentiment of comments on posts to understand
commentator reactions to different topics.
• Study the correlation between key offline events and
online activities using trends detection algorithm Wavelet
transforms (WT) to reveal changes in online activities.
Detailed description of each bullet is presented next.
A. Dataset
Our dataset is comprised of 9,700 posts by the five presi-
dential candidates: Clinton, Trump, Sanders, Cruz, and Kasich,
and 12,050,595 comments from the public (who we will
797
refer to as commentators). The dataset spans a period of
time between January 1st , 2015 (when candidates announced
they will run for presidential race) to February 28th , 2016, a
fourteen month period. We employed python code to collect
these posts and comments, removing posts or comments that
are not written in English.
B. Topic Inference for Candidates Posts
To discover topics discussed on candidates posts, we applied
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) [22] on all candidates’
posts. We utilized LDA because it is one of the most popular
probabilistic topic inference models. This model assumes each
document (post in our case) as a mixture of K latent topics, and
each topic is a probability distribution over words. Therefore,
a topic is the clustering of co-occurred words together. For
instance, the topic Planned Parenthood is described by co-
occurred words (e.g., Planned, Parenthood, Women, defund,
God) We utilized Gensim LDA implementation [23] to infer
latent topics from posts and then use the resultant model to
assign each post to its most probable topic.
C. Sentiment Analysis of Commentators
We conducted sentiment analysis on comments to determine
whether reactions to posts were positive, negative, or neutral.
We pre-processed comments to remove those that are not
written in English. Also, any comment that had a repetitious
pattern was considered as spam and was removed, as an exam-
ple (VOTE FOR SANDERS, VOTE FOR SANDERS). Next,
we utilized Stanford CoreNLP [24] as an open-source tool
for calculating sentiment score. This is a well-known tool for
analyzing sentiment, and it generates sentiment scores from 0
to 4, with 0 being the most negative, 4 being the most positive,
and 2 being neutral. Next, we studied comment sentiment as
oblique cumulative curves over time (next section) as well as
sentiment of inferred topics per candidate.
D. Oblique Cumulative Curves and Trends Detection
To understand the correlation between key offline events and
online activities, we studied the trends of online activities such
as comment volume and sentiment. We also studied the raw
time series representation of comment volume and sentiment
that is noisy and hard to understand. Thus, we utilized the
following techniques to identify clear key changes in trends:
• Oblique cumulative curves to show more clean and clear
trends compared to the raw ones.
• Wavelet transforms to de-noise the data and precisely
identify the key events trends in resultant oblique curves
of comments volume and sentiment.
Oblique cumulative curve techniques are used in the field of
transportation engineering research to track changes in traffic,
speed and traffic flow respectively [25], [26]. Cumulative curve
showing the cumulative counts of comments C(t) and their
sentiment at time t is constructed. An oblique cumulative curve
is then constructed by deducting the background cumulative
count co × t∗ at all time t, where t∗ is the elapsed time from
 Fig. 1: Distribution of Topics

to to t, and co is the average comments per day. The oblique TABLE I: The Two Categories of Topics
cumulative count at time t is defined by the formula: Election Events Policies
FOX Election Coverage Iran Deal, ISIS and Gun Control
Primaries Planned Parenthood
O(t) = C(t) − co × (to − t) (1)
Election Debates Immigration and Obamacare
Caucus Women Rights and Education
Wavelet transforms (WT) are used to de-noise the oblique Election Events Health Care and Social Security
cumulative curve and precisely identify key events during the Campaigning Taxes and Federal Spending
study period where the users have strongly responded to the Electability Wall Street and Middle Class
candidate’s posts. These events are marked by the changes in Campaign Support and Fund raising Climate Change and Income Inequality
Election Voting
the signal (peaks and dips). WT is a powerful spectral analysis
tool used to analyze non-stationary signals as it can provide
both time and frequency information of the signal unlike
Fourier transforms which only give the frequency information.
p
T = 2 × log(n) × mad(ϕϕ
x) (3)
In this study, discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) are used to
de-noise the raw signal and defined by the formula: Where n is the sample size, mad is the median absolute
deviation and ϕϕx is the first level wavelet coefficients. Matlab
t−τ
Z
ϕ 1 version of Simple Peak Finding algorithm was then used to
ϕx (s, τ ) = p O(t)ϕ( )dt (2)
|s| s detect key dates accurately.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
Where s ∈ 2j , τ = k × s, (j,k) ∈ Z 2 (s6= 0)
A. Resultant Latent Topics
Wavelet coefficients are computed at discrete values of scale We ran LDA on all candidates’ posts. We experimented
s and time t. The objective here is to obtain de-noised signal with different numbers of topics and found K=20, i.e., 20
by eliminating noise in the raw signal which is assumed to topics was the best number in terms of meaningful topics. Each
be Gaussian distributed. This is done by decomposing the raw topic is described by ten different keywords. There are three
signal (in this case, oblique cumulative curve) into different topics that did not show any relevant information; thus we
frequency components and removing the noise from the high considered them as noise and removed them. The distribution
frequency part of signal by applying certain thresholds on the of the remaining 17 topics is presented in Fig. 1, where the X
wavelet coefficients and then reconstruct the de-noised signal axis represents the topics and Y axis represents the number of
using inverse transforms. More details on this methodology posts associated with the topic. There are two main categories
can be found in [27]. In our study noise is estimated using of the resultant topics: Election Events related topics with
a threshold which is based on median absolute deviation as 4,771 posts and Policies related topics with 3,668 posts. Table
shown below: I shows the topics of each category.

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 Fig. 2: Distribution of Topics per Candidates

Among the most discussed topics in Election Events cat-

egory is the Fox News election coverage where Trump com-
plained that the channel treated him badly and Megan Kelly
insulted him at the first GOP debate on August 3rd , 2015.
His boycotting of Fox News’ hosted sparked discussions as
he continued to blame Fox for leaning toward Cruz, especially
on the Bill O’Reilly TV program. The most discussed topic in
the Policies category is national security in terms of Iran deal,
ISIS, and gun control. Within Policies category there are other
important topics such Planned Parenthood, women’s rights,
education, and taxes/federal spending. Unlike other elections
in 2008 and 2012, the least discussed topics on this election
are climate change and income inequality. Our focus in this
study is Policies related topics.
Fig. 3: Sentiment and Comments Volume Curves for Cruz
The distribution of posts by topic for each candidate is
presented in Fig. 2. The numbers on each topic band are the
total number of posts for that topic, and numbers on each book posts; Cruz discussed topics immigration, Obamacare,
candidate band is his/her total number of posts. Both Demo- Planned Parenthood, the Iran Deal, ISIS, and gun control, and
cratic candidates focus on Healthcare and Social Security; Kasich mainly discussed taxes and federal spending.
Clinton also discussed the topics relating to women’s rights
and education on her Facebook posts while Sanders discussed B. Oblique Cumulative Curves and Trends Detection
the topics of Wall Street and the middle class. Conversely, the Fig. 3 shows the raw comments and sentiment data for pres-
Republican candidates focused on various topics on their Face- idential candidate Cruz. Due to its noisy nature, it is difficult

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Fig. 4: De-noised Oblique Curves with Identified Trends for
Cruz
Fig. 5: De-noised Oblique Curves with Identified Trends for
Sanders
to understand trends. Therefore, we constructed cumulative
oblique curves, presented in Fig 4 for Cruz. In that figure,
curves were de-noised using wavelet transforms and key events
trends were identified as well. Key events trends represent
peaks in sentiment (positive) and comment volume are shown
by circles (dots). Due to space limitation, we included the
analysis of Cruz and Sanders only.
When analyzing the patterns of trends for both candidates,
we noticed that changes in trends are driven by three factors:
1) popular post, 2) offline debate, and 3) candidate’s dropping
out. Cruz’s popular post on April 10th , 2015 about his support
for soldiers and the Army caused his cumulative curve of
comments volume to grow and reached a total of 41,949
comments on that day. However, after the first GOP debate
800
(the peak on August 4th , 2015), his cumulative sentiment curve
dropped due to his poor performance in the debate. He gained
high average cumulative positive sentiment of 11.01 when
the Republican presidential candidate George Pataki dropped
out of the race on January, 2nd 2016. Fig 5 presents Sanders
key trends identified by wavelet transforms. When he posted
his announcement (April 30th , 2015) about his campaign for
president, he received higher comments volume of 42,513
and more positive sentiment (cumulative average of 4.38).
He gained slightly more positive sentiment when Democrats
presidential candidates Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee dropped
out of the race on October 19th and 24th , 2015. Similarly,
he received higher comments (36,303) and positive sentiment
(5.25) after the Jewish Coalition Forum on December 4th ,
2015.
C. Sentiment Analysis of Reactions
We further analyzed topics distribution and reactions of
commentators on each candidate’s post in terms of senti-
ment, as given in Fig. 6 (next page). Republican candidates’
campaigns have focused on four major topics: “Iran deal,
ISIS, gun control”, “Planned Parenthood”, “Immigration and
Obamacare”, and “taxes and federal spending”. For all three
candidates, the reactions on the Iran deal, ISIS and gun control
are negative which reflect the commentators’ outrage on the
topic. On the topic of Planned Parenthood, all candidates have
positive reactions as commentators supported their candidate
whether they were for or against the proposed plan. On
immigration and Obamacare, both Cruz and Trump proposed
to stop illegal immigrants and build a wall along U.S.-Mexico
border. Such posts sparked anger from commentators, whether
it was anger on the proposed plan or anger on the immigrants
and other minorities in general. On taxes and federal spending,
Trump posted a few posts on the topic and received positive
reactions; whereas, Kasich was considerably more active on
this topic and received noticeable negative reaction.
Democratic candidates focused on three major topics
namely: “Women rights and Education”, “Wall street and
Middle class”, and “Healthcare and Social security”. In Fig.
7 (last page), Sanders is active on issues that pertain to
reigning in Wall Street and growing the middle class, for which
he received very positive comments. However, he received
negative comments on his next major topic healthcare and
Social Security. Clinton is active on women’s rights and
education topics and her commentators reacted positively on
her posts. Clinton is also active on healthcare/Social Security.
She supported the Affordable Care Act and promised to
enhance and protect Social Security and Medicare.
By studying sentiments and the level of positive or negative
emotions, we can get estimates of how commentators view
a given candidate’s ability to lead on a given issue. For
example Sanders clearly has a lead on Wall Street and middle
class issue as estimated by sentiment scores, and if one
compared the Republican candidates on issues such as Planned
 Fig. 6: Sentiment Analysis on Topics for Republican Presidential Candidates
Parenthood, Cruz fares better versus Trump’s taxes and federal
spending plan which gets a lot more positive sentiment.
V. C ONCLUSION A ND F UTURE W ORK
This study examined the dynamics between candidate posts
and comments they received on Facebook. The paper also
explored how online activity might be connected to offline
events. Republican candidates have focused on four major
topics: “Iran ISIS, gun control”, “Planned Parenthood”, “im-
migration and Obamacare”, and “taxes and federal spending”.
Democratic candidates have focused on three major topics
namely: “women’s rights and education”, “Wall Street and
middle class”, and “healthcare and social security”. Detecting
trends in comments and sentiment analysis revealed the corre-
lation between offline events and candidates’ posts. When an-
alyzing sentiment of commentators on Republican candidates’
posts related to Iran deal, ISIS, and gun control topics, we
found that they reacted with angry comments represented by
negative sentiment. For Democratic candidates, commentators
on Wall Street/middle class topics reacted positively, showing
their support to the proposed reform plan. However, the
significance (strong/weak) and nature (positive/negative) of
sentiments varied between candidates within political parties
based on perceived credibility of the candidate’s degree of
credibility on a given issue. We employed topic modeling, sen-
timent analysis, and trends detection using wavelet transforms
to discover topics, trends, and reactions
This study has several limitations that need to be acknowl-
edged. First, we only analyzed one platform and so it is not
fully reflective of the entire social media campaign for the
candidates. Anecdotally we know from the press that activity
801
on Twitter is most often quoted in the media. Second, our
analysis, while insightful, has the benefit of hindsight. Further
work is required to build real-time predictive models that can
infer reactions to online activities based on posts by candidates
and offline activities.
We intend to expand on this study to build predictive
models focused on understanding the effects of online cam-
paign activity. Moreover, we can analyze the data to study
other interesting questions that impact the design of social
media campaigns. Furthermore, we will study the evolutionary
development of each candidate networks of interactions to
understand patterns of growth and scatteredness.
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