Sentiment Analysis of the Spanish Press on X: The Case of the Gaza Conflict.

In October 2023, the conflict between Israel and Palestine entered a new phase of violence with unpredictable consequences for the Middle East, raising global concern over the unfolding events. From a Social Sciences perspective, analyzing public opinion on this issue is a highly relevant subject of study, requiring a combined and multidisciplinary methodological approach to fully understand its complexity. Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly sentiment analysis, provides technological tools to study large volumes of data. The goal of this proposal is to investigate the debate and sentiments generated around the conflict through social media platforms. Journalism is considered a key actor in shaping the public agenda regarding this international event. The ten most read Spanish newspapers during key dates — from October 7, 2023 (Hamas attack) to November 24 of the same year (ceasefire) — were selected, and using the web scraping tool TweetScraperR, the timeline of these media
outlets regarding the conflict, as well as the comments generated by their content, were gathered. Through NLP, the sentiments that provoke the strongest audience reactions are inferred. Additionally, semantic networks are presented to identify the most relevant themes and hashtags. The hypothesis is that tweets with higher emotional content generate greater public interaction. These findings invite reflection on the importance of using new analytical techniques to study political communication in the digital public sphere, particularly regarding affective polarization processes.