IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/teinso/v62y2020ics0160791x19306256.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A trend analysis on Sri Lankan politics based on facebook user reactions

Author

Listed:
  • Sally, M.S.
  • Wickramasinghe, M.I.E.

Abstract

The rapid growth of user interactions in social media sites gives useful insights in many areas. Facebook is the most popular social media site lately, with the highest number of active users, which is a valuable and hassle-free source in obtaining data. Despite its enthusiastic nature, it is a mere fact that people use Facebook to gain instant updates on the current state of affairs. The ability of getting updates from several sources of news channels in a single user news feed, the extreme ease of providing feedbacks on those news posts using gesture-based reactions, send and share messages among people are some of the main reasons for its increasing popularity in the perspective of attaining news. Politics has always been a ubiquitous topic in the world. Sri Lanka was in a war on terrorism for nearly three decades, followed by a governance (2005–2015) led by the same political party which was alleged for autocracy and lasted for nearly a decade has influenced the citizens’ political conviction heavily. On such a background, the “Good-Governance” (2015–2019) which is a coalition government, trounced the ruling government at the presidential election held by then, which they claimed to direct Sri Lanka towards a sustainable, stable, responsible and moral society with necessary constitutional amendments guaranteeing democracy to all ethnic groups eradicating corruption, wastage and fraud. The interest and motivation of this study builds up to discover whether there are any significant trends in the Sri Lankan political context following this transformation, in the perspective of the general public. Facebook user reactions on news posts have been used for this study as the data source. The analysis of this study reveals an increasing trend of user reactions in politics from 2011 to 2018. Further, it is identified that the present government (2015–2019) has a decreasing trend of user reactions over the past years (2011–2015) in the sight of its citizens, although they pledged for a better governance. On the contrary, the previous government has an increasing trend even though they were overpowered by the “Good-Governance” for its alleged unscrupulous ruling.

Suggested Citation

  • Sally, M.S. & Wickramasinghe, M.I.E., 2020. "A trend analysis on Sri Lankan politics based on facebook user reactions," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:teinso:v:62:y:2020:i:c:s0160791x19306256
    DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101321
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X19306256
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101321?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:teinso:v:62:y:2020:i:c:s0160791x19306256. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/technology-in-society .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.