Polarización sentimental en Twitter durante el Paro Nacional de 2021 en Colombia

Abstract

In 2021, Colombia experienced one of the most significant periods of social protests –initially motivated as a response to the reforms proposed by this country’s government in tax, health, or pension matters– in its recent republican history. A highly conflictive scenario, in which social networks played a leading role reporting what happened each day of protests and as a scenario to vindicate social demands. In this context, this work aims to understand how the sentimental polarization observed on Twitter favored the digital mobilization strategy. To this end, we collected 1,215,646 messages published in Spanish on Twitter from 05/01/2021 to 07/03/2022, and linked to the leading hashtags used during the period studied (#paronacionalcolombia, #nosestanmatandocolombia, #SOSColombia, #Colombiaalertaroja, and #ColombiaSOSDDHH). The results show us an apparent coordination between users located in different countries, who digitally mobilize the debate around these protests through the viralization of thematic axes focused mainly on making visible the protests’ development, the violence of the Colombian security forces, and the violation of human rights. These issues addressed in micro-narratives published on Twitter contain a different sentimental charge, depending on the country of origin of these messages. This can favour the polarization and conflict of public opinion around what happened in that country.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.