SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF POLARIZING TOPICS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: NEWS SITE READERS’ COMMENTS ON THE TRAYVON MARTIN CONTROVERSY Gabe Ignatow, Nicholas Evangelopoulos and Konstantinos Zougris ABSTRACT Purpose À The authors apply topic sentiment analysis (several relatively new text analysis methods) to the study of public opinion as expressed in social media by comparing reactions to the Trayvon Martin controversy in spring 2012 by commenters on the partisan news websites the Huffington Post and Daily Caller. Methodology/approach À Topic sentiment analysis is a text analysis method that estimates the polarity of sentiments across units of text within large text corpora (Lin & He, 2009; Mei, Ling, Wondra, Su, & Zhai, 2007). Findings À We apply topic sentiment analysis to public opinion as expressed in social media by comparing reactions to the Trayvon Martin Studies in Media and Communications, Volume 11, 261À285 Copyright r 2016 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2050-2060/doi:10.1108/S2050-206020160000011021 261 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39