Exploring the concept of financial domination on social media: sentiment and text analysis on Twitter

Abstract

In today’s digital culture, we face a new behavior that started on Twitter, a social media platform with a large user base. This study explores how users participate in the financial slave-themed Twitter discussions and the master-slave relationship network. Accordingly, the sample consisting of the Twitter account messages which seek to meet financial slaves and mistresses is examined using text and sentiment analysis. Within the scope of the study, 277,293 tweets related to financial slavery were collected between May 2020 and November 2021, and text/sentiment analysis were performed on findom (financial domination) tweets. The keywords used in the analysis were selected from the most tweeted concepts related to financial domination and slavery (“financial slave,” #financialslave, #findom, #humanatm, #paypig, “financial domination”). The analysis of the discursive structures in the text/sentiment analysis results revealed that certain sentiments and emotions such as trust and joy were pre-requisite to establish online findom relationship. Female domination (femdom) related tweets were more prevalent in tweets while the edges between findom fetish and other kinks (foot fetish, bdsm, porn etc.) were somewhat blurred on Twitter. These show that there are vibrant user base and community on Twitter and the studies like ours are important to understand communicative dimension of financial domination.