A Trend Analysis on Sri Lankan Politics based on Facebook User Reactions

Abstract

The rapid growth of user interactions in social media sites gives useful insights on many areas. Facebook is the most popular social media site lately, with the highest number of active users, which is a valuable and hassle free source in obtaining data. Despite its enthusiastic nature, it is a mere fact that people use Facebook to gain instant updates on current news. The extreme ease of providing feedbacks using gesture based reactions is another main reason for its popularity. Politics has been a ubiquitous topic in the world at all times. Sri Lanka has been in an ethnic war for nearly three decades, followed by a nepotistic governance which lasted for nearly a decade has influenced the citizens’ political conviction heavily. The “GoodGovernance” trounced the previous government on such a background, which they claim to direct Sri Lanka towards a sustainable, stable, responsible and moral society with necessary constitutional amendments guaranteeing democracy to all ethnic groups eradicating corruption, wastage and fraud. The interest and motivation of this thesis builds up to discover whether there are any significant trends in the Sri Lankan political context in the perspective of the general public. The analysis of this study reveals an increasing trend in politics from 2011 to 2018. Further, it is identified that the present government has a decreasing trend over the past three years in the sight of its citizens, although they pledged for a better governance. On the contrary, the previous government has an increasing trend even though they were overpowered by the “Good-Governance” for its unscrupulous ruling.