Cross-Platform Digital Discourse Analysis of the Israel-Hamas Conflict: Sentiment, Topics, and Event Dynamics

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Antonakaki, Despoina, Ioannidis, Sotiris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908749435764736
author Antonakaki, Despoina
Ioannidis, Sotiris
author_facet Antonakaki, Despoina
Ioannidis, Sotiris
contents The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news sharing, advocacy, and propaganda. In this study, we analyze Telegram, Twitter/X, and Reddit to examine how conflict narratives are produced, amplified, and contested across different digital spheres. Building on our previous work on Telegram discourse during the 2023 escalation, we extend the analysis longitudinally and cross-platform using an updated dataset spanning October 2023 to mid-2025. The corpus includes more than 187,000 Telegram messages, 2.1 million Reddit comments, and curated Twitter/X posts. We combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and transformer-based sentiment and emotion models to identify dominant themes, emotional dynamics, and propaganda strategies. Telegram channels provide unfiltered, high-intensity documentation of events; Twitter/X amplifies frames to global audiences; and Reddit hosts more reflective and deliberative discussions. Our findings reveal persistent negative sentiment, strong coupling between humanitarian framing and solidarity expressions, and platform-specific pathways for the diffusion of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli narratives. This paper offers three contributions: (1) a multi-platform, FAIR-compliant dataset on the Israel-Hamas war, (2) an integrated pipeline combining topic modeling, sentiment and emotion analysis, and spam filtering for large-scale conflict discourse, and (3) empirical insights into how platform affordances and affective publics shape the evolution of digital conflict communication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Platform Digital Discourse Analysis of the Israel-Hamas Conflict: Sentiment, Topics, and Event Dynamics
Antonakaki, Despoina
Ioannidis, Sotiris
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news sharing, advocacy, and propaganda. In this study, we analyze Telegram, Twitter/X, and Reddit to examine how conflict narratives are produced, amplified, and contested across different digital spheres. Building on our previous work on Telegram discourse during the 2023 escalation, we extend the analysis longitudinally and cross-platform using an updated dataset spanning October 2023 to mid-2025. The corpus includes more than 187,000 Telegram messages, 2.1 million Reddit comments, and curated Twitter/X posts. We combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and transformer-based sentiment and emotion models to identify dominant themes, emotional dynamics, and propaganda strategies. Telegram channels provide unfiltered, high-intensity documentation of events; Twitter/X amplifies frames to global audiences; and Reddit hosts more reflective and deliberative discussions. Our findings reveal persistent negative sentiment, strong coupling between humanitarian framing and solidarity expressions, and platform-specific pathways for the diffusion of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli narratives. This paper offers three contributions: (1) a multi-platform, FAIR-compliant dataset on the Israel-Hamas war, (2) an integrated pipeline combining topic modeling, sentiment and emotion analysis, and spam filtering for large-scale conflict discourse, and (3) empirical insights into how platform affordances and affective publics shape the evolution of digital conflict communication.
title Cross-Platform Digital Discourse Analysis of the Israel-Hamas Conflict: Sentiment, Topics, and Event Dynamics
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02367