Social Media Users’ Interactions During the Italian European Elections: A Comparative Analysis of Two Political Leaders’ Followers Using a Sentiment Analysis Algorithm

This study aims to integrate Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodologies with text analysis to examine public sentiment surrounding Italian political figures during the 2024 European election campaign. Specifically, Instagram comments from the profiles of two political leaders were collected over a defined period, April 8th to June 7th, 2024. Subsequent text extraction was performed, followed by sentiment analysis using Feel-it. The resulting sentiment scores were then employed to construct a signed network, enabling the visualization and analysis of positive and negative interactions within the observed online discourse.