Introduction
The United States is seeing a new space race by several commercial entities. Two of the most prominent, SpaceX and Blue Origin have gained a lot of notoriety arguably because of the prominence of their billionaire founders (Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos). I am interested to see if Twitter users have interesting emotional reactions to these two space travel brands. In order to gather the data I used the rtweets package to scrape data from the Twitter api. I used the search terms SpaceX and “Blue Origin” Interestingly there were 2000 tweets for Blue Origin and 1781 tweets for SpaceX. I matched the numbers and added merged the tweets into one data file to conduct analysis.
Positive and Negative Sentiment by Brand (bing lexicon)
I first wanted to answer the question “what the general sentiment are (positive and negative) regarding the two brands in the tweets”. I conducted a positive and negative sentiment by brand based on the bing lexicon which categorizes words in a binary fashion into positive and negative categories. The chart below shows the number of tweets referencing the American aerospace brands Blue Origin and SpaceX. From the data it appears that there were quite a few more tweets with strong emotion about Blue Origin with most of them were negative. ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity’ is often associated with Phineas T. Barnum, the 19th century American showman and circus owner. Barnum was a self-publicist of the first order and never missed an opportunity to present his wares to the public. As with many other supposed quotations, there’s no hard evidence to link the ‘bad publicity’ quotation to him. If this adage is true, then Blue Origin is talked about more often (even though much of it is negative).
Positive and Negative Sentiment by hour by Brand (by hour of day)
The second question I wanted to answer is was “do these sentiments for the two brands changed depending on the hour of the day”. The chart below shows positive tweets by time of day, based on the timing of the tweets. It is important to note that represents overall sentiment (sum of positive and negative). SpaceX’s tweets are very balanced throughout the day and skew more positive in the evening. People are tweeting predominantly negative sentiment about Blue Origin throughout the day with a slight peak of positive sentiment at the end of the day. Tweets regarding SpaceX are balanced though out the day and then skew very positively in the evening.
Positive and Negative Sentiment by Brand (NRC lexicon)
I wanted to dig into the sentiment for these Brand and understand “what emotions they are evoking or representing”. I used the NRC Emotion Lexicon which is a list of English words and their associations with eight basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) and two sentiments (negative and positive). The data is not surprising in that Blue Origin tweets reflected much more negative emotion than SpaceX. Blue Origin and does also have slightly more positive emotion than SpaceX. One interesting note is that Blue Origin had extremely significant indicators of Sadness than any other emotion which would be interesting to pursue with further research.
Positive and Negative Sentiment by Brand related to retweets
Because of the functionality of twitter one way to measure negative (or positive) reactions to tweets is to measure the ratio of likes to retweets. A tweet is “ratioed” (implying negative reaction) when replies to a tweet vastly outnumber likes or retweets. A greater than a 2:1 reply to retweet ratio, and the higher the ratio, the worse you have been “ratioed”.
I decided to do a quick check and compare the retweets (denominator of the equation) to answer the question that “if there was a relationship by brand and by negative or positive sentiments”. Retweets should arguably be associated with positive sentiment. The number of tweets with positive sentiment and retweets were comparable (even though not exact) between Blue Origin and SpaceX.
When looking at Negative sentiment and retweets Blue Origin seem to have more tweets with negative sentiment that are retweeted. This could be an indication of the high negative sentiment around Blue Origin. I would like to do future research on this adding in the replies and creating a new ratios measure.
It was fascinating to examine the sentiment in tweets to the two aerospace brands Blue Origin and SpaceX. This initial investigation show quit a bit of negative sentiment with regards to Blue Origin. In addition to the additional research discussed in my analysis above, it would also be interesting to compare this data to the sentiment with regards to their founders (Musk and Bezos) as well as their other companies (Tesla and Amazon). It would also be interesting to conduct an analysis of ratio data for the twitter accounts of these 6 entities ( Blue Origin, SpaceX, Musk, Bezos, Tesla, and Amazon).