Project description:

Before Hong Kong issued the “HKSAR National Security Law”, the leaders of Taiwan’s two main political parties expressed their views. We analyzed the content of the responses to their posts on Facebook to understand what Taiwanese people think about this bill.

Impact reached:

By analyzing tens of thousands of messages, we can find out exactly what Taiwanese think about this bill and what Hong Kong people expect of the Taiwanese government and politicians.

Techniques/technologies used:

This project is based on the Facebook comments, we get the data by Python script with Selenium. And make the segments by Jieba, a Python library for CJK segmentation. After that, we have the term frequency analytics by TF/IDF to identify the keywords of each comment.

What was the hardest part of this project?

People’s messages contain emotion which were hard to identify. And We can only speculate where users come from based on few information. Especially in Hong Kong, under the shadow of police raids, many users changed their photo IDs, names, and concealed personal information, making it more difficult to locate their true identities.

What can others learn from this project?

We can obtain real-time public opinion through the data on the social network.

Project links:

www.readr.tw/post/2436