USER ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS ON CHANGE IN SOCIAL MEDIA OWNERSHIP: ELON MUSK’S TWITTER TAKEOVER

Abstract

Social media is a form of mass-self communication, which the users can find, create, share, and re-distribute theinformation with many others without depending on time and space in an interconnected network. The discussions andconversations on social media happened to shape public opinions, and pave the way for social movements, echo chambers, soand so forth. While there are still ongoing debates about whether social media is a public sphere, it is clear to say that socialmedia constitutes the daily communication routines of many people and is often used in personal and organizationalcommunication and entertainment practices. Twitter itself as one of the social media platforms is already instrumentalized inmany cases that span from social movements to agenda settings. Due to its digital architecture and features, Twitter is suitedfor network-based discussions that can be raised by using a good number of hashtags. Hence, it differs from traditional mediaby providing users with a more active and participatory environment in which they can collaborate to raise an issue. Thisnature of Twitter paved the way for empirical and computer-aided studies that focus on measuring and interpreting the users’opinions and attitudes by utilizing big data. Hence, this study aims to measure opinions and find out raised issues regardingElon Musk’s takeover of Twitter with a quantitative approach. The study applies the combination of computational techniques which consist of sentiment analysis, text analysis, and network analysis on 131,574 tweets that contain #twittertakeover,#elonmusktwitter, #elonmuskbuytwitter hashtags were collected between April 1st 2022 and July 31st, 2022.