Twitter's Mirroring of the 2022 Energy Crisis: What It Teaches Decision-Makers - A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The paper pertains to the field of opinion mining on social networks in view of decision-making. It was designed to determine the effect of the energy crises on the socio-ethical and ethical worries and concerns related to the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the crisis, as reflected on Twitter. Knowing public opinions during crises is a key component of decision-making. Other purposes include the determination of the perception of the correlations between these categories of concerns and the determination of specificities of distributions of such perceptions, as represented by words. A mixture of tools from lexical, topical, and semantical analysis were applied for generating the bag of words and for analyzing a set of tweets collected during the initial stage of an energy crisis, with special emphasis to coherence indices. The results confirm that energy crises may be associated with such concerns, as expected, but the association probability is low for the 2022 energy crisis, indicating at least a partial success of the mitigation decisions of the respective authorities. Some surprising relationships also occurred from the study. The paper is dedicated to Acad. Florin Gheorghe Filip, at the 75th anniversary.

Some Properties of Zipf’s Law and Applications

“…In relation with social networks, particularly Twitter (currently X), Zipf's law has been used to find suspicious patterns of communication [33] and for sentiment analysis [32]. Suggestions that words follow Zipf's law, when words are used on social networks for subjects related to various events, have been made in studies such as [34][35][36][37]. We provide an example in Figure 5, which shows Zipf's law in tweets with negative sentiment, where the tweets refer to the energy crisis in Europe in 2021-2022.…”

Content Analysis Using Specific Natural Language Processing Methods for Big Data

“…A multitude of scientific papers published in connection with an event, an earthquake [41], energy crisis [42], a worldwide crisis situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, has conveyed a series of manifestations, states of distress, emotion, joy or hope, criticism or discouragement, recommendations, opinions, and suggestions of the researchers involved and society.…”

“…If this study were completed with similar studies conducted to find out the reaction of the population through social networks [41,42,77,80,81], then the picture of the pandemic, of the event considered, with the states of crisis and pain or recovery of the population, of the areas of economic, social, cultural life would be more complete. Recognizing the problems society faces would become a prerequisite for finding solutions.…”