Analysis of Social Media Discourse and Life Cycle Evolution

When international events happen, related discourse is abundant on local social media, less academic attention has been paid to comparisons between topical issues and user interactions in different platforms. Taking the US-China trade war as a case, this paper provides a discourse analysis framework to discuss the topical issues and temporal evolution trends of social media reflecting local users' opinions. This study uses text mining, topical analysis, and temporal trend analysis to examine how social media interactions between Twitter and Weibo users’ response to the discourse of the US-China trade war. We saved the complete datasets for both Twitter and Weibo platforms to the Microsoft Excel formatted file.