Negative sentiment surrounding VW soars
Following Volkswagen’s admission that nearly 11 million of its cars are fitted with the software that dupes diesel emissions testing, there has been a considerable rise in the negative sentiment expressed towards the company via social media.
Roughly 122K tweets were analysed surrounding the VW revelations. On the 29th September 56.96% of tweets were positive, prior to the figures on how many cars were affected in the UK. Whereas following the revelation that almost 1.2m cars in the UK are fitted with cheat software, on the 30th September, 51.3% of tweets mentioning VW expressed a negative sentiment.
The study was carried out using TheySay, a social media sentiment analysis tool, created by the University of Oxford. It boasts the most advanced computational linguistics software of its kind, not merely monitoring positive and negative sentiment but a wide range of human emotions including humour and sarcasm.
