Public Emotion and Response immediately following the Death of George Floyd: A Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Comments

Social media use has become a critical form of social interaction connecting people of all ages, and across geographic regions, political, and philosophical persuasions. The results of these interactions are massive amounts of data which, through exploratory methods like sentiment analysis, can provide insight into overall public emotion and response to public and key sociopolitical events. The present study explores the sentiment surrounding the Black Lives Matter Facebook page by analyzing the comments under the video of the killing of George Floyd, posted on May 25, 2020. This examination of sentiment uses assumptions of selective exposure theory. We employed a three-pronged sentiment analysis approach and topic modeling and found an overall negative polarity in public sentiment among 7,137 Facebook comments on the video of George Floyd's death. The findings reveal a divisive response to the video which captured the death of George Floyd, which more generally suggests negative emotion in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. A sentiment test also returned a noticeably high happiness score, which might imply the widely unavoidable effects of trolls in internet discourse in the current racial context.