Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, February 19, 2025
11:00 AM: Talk with Jiho Kwak - Analyzing Country-Level Heterogeneity in Public Attitudes Toward Migration Topics on Bluesky
Abstract
Migration is a globally significant political issue, with discourse varying across countries. This study examines the regionally varying patterns of migration discourse on Bluesky, an emerging platform that saw an increase in number of users following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and its subsequent policy changes. We explore how Bluesky users discuss migration issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, focusing on key topics, sentiment, and variations in word usage. To achieve this, we identify country-specific themes, sentiment dynamics, and construct dialectograms using embeddings trained on posts from each country to explore nuanced linguistic differences. During this process, since Bluesky lacks geolocation metadata, we employ an large language model (LLM) to annotate posts based on the country they reference. Our findings reveal distinct themes shaping Bluesky users' migration discourse in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. In all countries, negative sentiment posts outnumber positive sentiment posts approximately five times, and the predominant themes of negative sentiment posts were more partisan compared to those of positive sentiment posts. A bilateral comparison using dialectograms highlights words co-occur distinctively with words related to recently relevant subtopics in each corpus. This study provides new insights into regional variations in migration discourse on Bluesky and introduces an innovative approach for analyzing social data sources that lack traditional metadata.
About
Jiho Kwak is a bachelor's student at Seoul National University, majoring in Geography and Statistics. In the field of demography, he is particularly interested in the spatiotemporal dynamics of migration and novel data-driven methodologies. During his stay at the MPIDR, he applied various natural language processing techniques to analyze social media discourse on migration issues.
Register to Take Part
You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to office-zagheni@demogr.mpg.de.
Online Seminar Talk, February, 12th from 11:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)