Social Media Opinion on the Fiscal Cliff Negotiations: Emotions
Take Over  On holidays, social media channels tend to light up
with pictures and tales of parties, smart clothes, food and
drink. On New Year’s Eve 2012, people turned to social media for
festive reasons and to check the news and express their social
media opinion about the impending “fiscal cliff.”  Social Media
Opinion Fiscal CliffNews reports about the contentious last-
minute negotiations in Washington, DC pointed out the angry tone
of many posts on social media. Social intelligence company
NetBase recently released an analysis of negative sentiment
around the fiscal cliff, which, by their calculation, ranged
from -37 before the deal was reached to -6 after legislators
arrived at an agreement. Unlike NetBase’s limited basic
sentiment analysis, which shows general positive and negative
sentiment and a word cloud without context, we used Crimson
Hexagon’s ForSight™ social media opinion analysis platform to
uncover a deeper understanding of the t