# A Framework to Understand Attitudes towards Immigration through Twitter
## 5 Results
### Content Characterisation  
To better understand the discussion driving the expression of positive and negative attitudes towards immigration and answer our question RQ2, we performed content analysis producing a characterisation of the most frequently used terms associated with each user stance profile. We weighted each term using log-odds ratios with an Uninformative Dirichlet Prior [73]. Figure 5 displays the top-30 attributes per attitude, revealing that own-attitude retweeting behaviour is the most prominent feature for _empathy_ and _threat_. This is arguably expected due to homophilic interactions [72], a phenomenon that has been observed in political discussion in Chile [78]. However, care must be taken when interpreting the result, as this reflects interactions with accounts that were pre-labelled only. A plausible explanation is that highly popular accounts that can be labelled through methods tend to make their positions explicit. Figure 4: Attitude classification: Top 50 most important features. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l l} \hline \hline
**Attitude** & **Accounts** & **Total Tweets** & **RTs** & **Quotes** & **Replies** \\ \hline Empathy & \% 71.98 (26,414) & \% 57.46 (92,374) & \% 61.94 (65,989) & \% 45.62 (9238) & \% 32.81 (6320) \\ Undisclosed & \% 3.24 (1190) & \% 4.52 (7261) & \% 1.44 (1531) & \% 1.87 (379) & \% 3.61 (695) \\ Threat & \% 24.78 (0904) & \% 38.02 (61,140) & \% 36.62 (39,012) & \% 52.50 (10,631) & \% 63.59 (12,250) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Distribution of user accounts and tweets per attitude and account type. Neutral terms, such as migrante (_migrant_) and migracion (_migration_) and haitiano (_Haitian_ as a singular noun) feature prominently in the _empathy_ group. Emojis are typically used to express political attitudes [17] and we observe that the red heart emoji is associated with _empathy_, possibly as an expression of solidarity or liking of immigrants-related content. Content related to news items also feature prominently in empathetic Twitter content. Ranking in the top-50 items, we identified the case of [PERSON]: a Haitian who saved a person that fell from a nine-story building; and, [PERSON]: a Haitian mother who died after being arrested by the Chilean police under unclear circumstances. We also identified political-based debates, including retweets of [PERSON]'s and mentions of a debate of a national migration law (#leydemigraciones). In contrast, words such as inmigracion (_immigration_), extranjeros (_foreigners_) and haitianos (plural, _Haitians_) are often used by the threat group. Immigration placed the focus on migration as a process and concerns about its potential implications for the national health, education and labour market systems, rather than on understanding the individuals themselves. The use of foreigners and Haitians may be used to draw a clear distinction between the \"we\" and \"us\". The use of the Chilean flag also features prominently among the _threat_ group, arguably associated with expressions of nationalism. _Threat_ users also tend to identify their alignment with right-wing views, including \"derecha\" (right-wing) in their biographies; tagging right-wing politicians, such as [PERSON] (@sebastianpirena, current president of Chile) and [PERSON] (@)oseantonioakast, extreme right-wing presidential candidate); and, posts about left-wing parties (\"izquierda\") and the Communist Party (\"communistas\"). Overall, the results highlight a strong association between anti-migration views and conservative political ideologies. This is despite not including any explicit political keywords in the seed list for our stance classifier. We did not observe incidence of the seed words (used to train the classifier) in the content analysis and relevant features associated with each attitude; since only one of them appears within the top ranking (tourists, in the threat group).