After Sandy Hook Elementary: A Year in the Gun Control Debate on Twitter – Presented at the Data For Good Exchange 2016.

“The mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school on December 14, 2012 catalyzed a year of active debate and legislation on gun control in the United States. Social media hosted an active public discussion where people expressed their support and opposition to a variety of issues surrounding gun legislation. In this paper, we show how a content-based analysis of Twitter data can provide insights and understanding into this debate. We estimate the relative support and opposition to gun control measures, along with a topic analysis of each camp by analyzing over 70 million gun-related tweets from 2013. We focus on spikes in conversation surrounding ma jor events related to guns throughout the year. Our general approach can be applied to other important public health and political issues to analyze the prevalence and nature of public opinion. However, traditional surveys have a number of drawbacks, including limitations on the response types and cost restrictions on producing timely results. These limitations are well known in the public health realm where surveys, a critical data source for a variety of public health topics, are facing increasing feasibility challenges. As a result, researchers have turned to new data sources, such as search queries and social media . Social media has been used to estimate public opinion on a range of topics, including political sentiment and a range of public health topics, including gun control. Some work has looked at gun control tweets, but has focused on argument framing and not measuring public opinion.”