Emociones dominantes en contexto de protesta. Análisis del caso ecuatoriano en Twitter

The use of Twitter as an expansive message platform is increasingly frequent in political and citizen activism in Latin America. This research seeks to identify the dominant emotions that emerge from tweets during the phases of initiation, development, climax and decline of social protests in Ecuador in 2019. For data collection we first identified the two most used hashtags during the demonstration from October 1-14, 2019 [#paronacionalec with 36, 649 tweets and #dialogoxlapaz with 13, 210 tweets] and performed the extraction of 49, 859 tweets with the Twitter API. Using Word2Vec, Jasper's (1998; 2018) proposal was applied to identify the dominant emotions in each of the phases of the protest, which were delimited according to the detected distribution of tweets throughout the protest. Finally, qualitative semantic analysis was performed to determine the connotation assumed by each emotion in each phase. As a result, it was confirmed that the protester attributes a positive or negative value to emotions depending on their experiences with the events in the media.