Research/Conference Paper: “After Sandy Hook Elementary: A Year in the Gun Control Debate on Twitter”

Note: The following full text paper was recently shared by the authors on arXiv. It was presented at Data For Good Exchange 2016 on September 25th.
Title
After Sandy Hook Elementary: A Year in the Gun Control Debate on Twitter
Authors
Adrian Benton
Johns Hopkins University
Braden Hancock
Stanford University
Glen Coppersmith
Qntfy
John W. Ayers
San Diego State University
Mark Dredz
Johns Hopkins University
Source
via arXiv
Abstract

The mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school on December 14, 2012 catalyzed a year of active debate and legislation on gun control in the United States. Social media hosted an active public discussion where people expressed their support and opposition to a variety of issues surrounding gun legislation. In this paper, we show how a content-based analysis of Twitter data can provide insights and understanding into this debate. We estimate the relative support and opposition to gun control measures, along with a topic analysis of each camp by analyzing over 70 million gun-related tweets from 2013. We focus on spikes in conversation surrounding major events related to guns throughout the year. Our general approach can be applied to other important public health and political issues to analyze the prevalence and nature of public opinion.

Direct to Full Text Article (6 pages; PDF)

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