A trend analysis on Sri Lankan politics based on facebook user reactions

Abstract

The rapid growth of user interactions in social media sites gives useful insights in many areas. Facebook is the most popular social media site lately, with the highest number of active users, which is a valuable and hassle-free source in obtaining data. Despite its enthusiastic nature, it is a mere fact that people use Facebook to gain instant updates on the current state of affairs. The ability of getting updates from several sources of news channels in a single user news feed, the extreme ease of providing feedbacks on those news posts using gesture-based reactions, send and share messages among people are some of the main reasons for its increasing popularity in the perspective of attaining news. Politics has always been a ubiquitous topic in the world. Sri Lanka was in a war on terrorism for nearly three decades, followed by a governance (2005–2015) led by the same political party which was alleged for autocracy and lasted for nearly a decade has influenced the citizens’ political conviction heavily. On such a background, the “Good-Governance” (2015–2019) which is a coalition government, trounced the ruling government at the presidential election held by then, which they claimed to direct Sri Lanka towards a sustainable, stable, responsible and moral society with necessary constitutional amendments guaranteeing de mocracy to all ethnic groups eradicating corruption, wastage and fraud. The interest and motivation of this study builds up to discover whether there are any significant trends in the Sri Lankan political context following this transformation, in the perspective of the general public. Facebook user reactions on news posts have been used for this study as the data source. The analysis of this study reveals an increasing trend of user reactions in politics from 2011 to 2018. Further, it is identified that the present government (2015–2019) has a decreasing trend of user reactions over the past years (2011–2015) in the sight of its citizens, although they pledged for a better governance. On the contrary, the previous government has an increasing trend even though they were over powered by the “Good-Governance” for its alleged unscrupulous ruling.