Elon Musk is right when he says Twitter usage is the highest, but new analysis reveals massive negativity against the platform.
According to media intelligence and data analytics firm Meltwater, negative sentiment about Musk’s ownership of Twitter began in late April, when the takeover bid was first made.
Using Twitter’s data, Meltwater reported a significant spike of nearly 1.5 million “negative posts” around the time Musk confirmed he wanted to buy the platform, while reporting only 400,000 positive posts during the same period.
The trend reversed again in late October as the $66 billion acquisition blossomed — and the negative sentiment wasn’t limited to Twitter posts.
“On social media, the turn to negative sentiment is significant starting the week of Oct. 25, which marked the Elon acquisition,” said a spokeswoman for Meltwater.
“Looking at Twitter data alone, there are similar spikes in negative sentiment around the same period with a total of 42.9 million negative posts.”
Between October 22 and now, the data shows a general spike in messages.
During that period, the number of negative messages increased by almost 1.25 million per day, while the number of positive messages barely reached 500,000 per day. Neutral posts rose to nearly 2.1 million in the same time frame.
According to Meltwater’s spokeswoman, negative sentiment trends spiked during pivotal events of the Musk takeover on Twitter, including during massive layoffs and firings, the reintroduction of controversial accounts such as Donald Trump and Kanye West, and pushed Musk’s $8 verification plan.
“As for how reputation and sentiment develop with further layoffs over the weekend, it appears interest in Twitter has declined since its peak on social media on Nov. 18,” she said.
“However, negative sentiment continues to build (up 4 percent week-over-week) regarding the recovery of Donald Trump and Kanye on Twitter, as well as continued layoffs and uncertainty about the future of the app.”
Meltwater uses natural language processing to track sentiment, which determines whether the language in a social post is more positive or negative.
“Sentiment analysis analyzes a piece of text to determine the opinion expressed within it,” the spokeswoman said.
“The opinion is then labeled as more positive or more negative, which is called polarity. “The overall sentiment is then determined as Positive, Negative or Neutral, based on the total polarity score.
“If something is both positive and negative, but more positive, the polarity score would rate it as positive.”
While the sentiment is negative, it’s another thing or that bothers the richest man in the world.
Musk confirmed on Tuesday that the platform has added 1.6 million daily users in the past week.
“This will improve a lot as Twitter quickly becomes available outside of North America, Western Europe and Japan,” he said.
Since taking over, Musk has unapologetically fired shots at those who spoke badly of him and his policies.
“Shouldn’t Twitter be dead by now or something?” Musk jokingly asked on Twitter on Wednesday.
