Stance Classification of Social Media Users in Independence Movements

Social media and data mining are increasingly being used to analyse political and societal issues. Here we undertake the classification of social media users as supporting or opposing ongoing independence movements in their territories. Independence movements occur in territories whose citizens have conflicting national identities; users with opposing national identities will then support or oppose the sense of being part of an independent nation that differs from the officially recognised country. We describe a methodology that relies on users’ self-reported location to build datasets for three territories – Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland – and we test language-independent classifiers using four types of features. We show the effectiveness of the approach to build large annotated datasets, and the ability to achieve accurate, language-independent classification performances ranging from 85% to 97% for the three territories under study. A data analysis shows the existence of echo chambers that isolate opposing national identities from each other.