If you were online during the recently concluded Cockroach Janta Party-led protests, news coverage likely failed to match your experience on social media. I went looking for why, analysing 1,528 news articles and over 42,000 YouTube comments. I scored each one for tone using VADER, a standard, open-source sentiment-analysis tool. Then I checked the patterns against real attention and engagement data from YouTube API, Wikipedia pageview logs, and Google News search.
The search soon turned into four separate inquiries: who actually told the story, how people really felt about it, which moments truly mattered, and at what moment the story exploded.Let’s start with the mood since that is a mismatch many have already noticed. If you only read the news, you’d think the whole country was miserable for the entire 70 days between the CJP’s formation and Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. Real news coverage, scored day by day, stayed grim almost the entire second half of July, even on the day Pradhan resigned. But YouTube comments, scored the same way, stayed upbeat almost every single day from the moment the tear gas shelling started. The same 70 days, but two completely different moods.
Source: Author’s calculations based on VADER sentiment scoring of 1,528 news articles and 42,706 YouTube comments | Graphic: Manya Aggarwal
