Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Users Towards the Active Forces During the War on Gaza - The Al-Aqsa Flood as a Model (A comparative study between the official accounts of Al Jazeera English and CNN English on Facebook)

The study aimed to monitor user sentiment positive, negative and neutral in their comments on posts on the Al Jazeera English and CNN channels' Facebook accounts towards the active forces and analysis and interpretation, and to monitor the central issues included in users' comments on posts on the two channels' accounts, using the analytical survey method, in addition to the systematic comparison method to compare users' comments towards the active forces on the two study channels during the war on Gaza 2023. The analytical study sample included users' comments on posts related to the active forces on the two channels' Facebook accounts, which amounted to (237,435) comments from (20,659) posts. The researchers used the sentiment analysis tool using natural language processing (NLP) technology based on the machine learning approach and the Python programming language to collect the study data, in addition to using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) tool, which extracts topics from large texts.
The results of the study revealed a significant disparity in the coverage of the two study channels of posts by the active forces on Facebook in favor of the Al Jazeera English channel account, where the number of posts on it reached (19,471) posts, compared to (1,188) posts on the CNN channel account on Facebook, and that users of the Al Jazeera English channel account gave clear attention in their comments to the two main parties to the conflict in large proportions, namely Gaza at (59.4%) and Israel at (35.5%), while the United States of America occupied the first interests of users of the CNN channel account at (42.2%). The analysis also showed the presence of prominent pivotal issues that appeared in users’ comments on posts by the two study channels on Facebook towards the active forces, as the issue of “the suffering of civilians in Gaza” came in first place on the Al Jazeera English channel at (24.4%), and the issue of “supporting and defending Israel” came in first place on the CNN channel at (36.3%).