Sentiment analysis on Muslim social media from the perspective of Al-Farabi 's Madani society

Abstract

Growing up in the Era of Web 2.0 we have seen a quick dispersion and selection of web-based life systems. While social media have brought many benefits to different sectors of life, the question of the extent of its impact on human lives as well as a religion has been raised. Prior research has shown that social media nowadays change the way we communicate with each other globally, the way we share knowledge and ideas, and the way information is spread. This study aims to analyze the effects social media has on Muslims in the virtual Muslim world from the perspective of Al-Farabi’s ideal society seeking to access, explore and analyze what kind of news Muslims share on social media, certainly Facebook; what effects Facebook has on Muslims in the Muslim world and how Muslims utilize Facebook to promote Islamic values. Analyzing people’s opinions and feelings about certain subject is the task of sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is the process of analyzing subjective data using machine learning. The amount of data collected every day through Facebook is enormous, thus we draw out a sentiment analysis of Muslims’ comments and posts on Facebook using R as a platform to underline the significance of opinion mining amongst Muslims and where the Muslims stand when it comes to their religious values. The methodology is implemented using R programming and Facebook Graph API as the main source of data retrieval. Even though only the sentiment “nrc” lexicon is being used, it was sufficient enough to prove that the chosen methodology works and provides meaningful insights into the data collected as well as visualization of the results presented. Based on the results being obtained it can be inferred that all the graphs show that the distribution of the polarity is highly asymptotic on the right concluding that Muslims virtual community can be compared to Al-Farabi’s ideal society with the huge tendency of its citizens towards the promotion of truth, knowledge, happiness and good deeds.