HebrewSentiment

Reuven Rivlin. In October 2015, we used the open software application Netvizz (Rieder, 2013) to scrape all the comments to all of the president’s posts in the period of June – August 2014, the first three months of Rivlin’s presidency.2 While the president’s posts aimed at reconciling tensions and called for tolerance and empathy, the sentiment expressed in the comments to the president’s posts was polarized between citizens who warmly thanked the president, and citizens that fiercely critiqued his policy.

Of the 12,804 comments, 370 are neutral; 8,512 are positive, 3,922 negative. Data Annotation: A trained researcher examined each comment and determined its sentiment value, where comments with an overall positive sentiment were assigned the value 1, comments with an overall negative sentiment were assigned the value -1, and comments that are off-topic to the post’s content were assigned the value 0. We validated the coding scheme by asking a second trained researcher to code the same data.