  Citation: Sufi, F.; Alsulami, M. A Novel Method of Generating Geospatial Intelligence from Social Media Posts of Political Leaders. Information 2022, 13, 120. https:// doi.org/10.3390/info13030120 Academic Editor: Louai Alarabi Received: 9 February 2022 Accepted: 25 February 2022 Published: 28 February 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). information Article A Novel Method of Generating Geospatial Intelligence from Social Media Posts of Political Leaders Fahim Sufi 1, * and Musleh Alsulami 2 1 Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia 2 Information Systems Department, Umm Al-Qura University (UQU), Makkah 24382, Saudi Arabia; mhsulami@uqu.edu.sa * Correspondence: research@fahimsufi.com Abstract: Social media platforms such as Twitter have been used by political leaders, heads of states, political parties, and their supporters to strategically influence public opinions. Leaders can post about a location, a state, a country, or even a region in their social media accounts, and the posts can immediately be viewed and reacted to by millions of their followers. The effect of social media posts by political leaders could be automatically measured by extracting, analyzing, and producing real-time geospatial intelligence for social scientists and researchers. This paper proposed a novel approach in automatically processing real-time social media messages of political leaders with artificial intelligence (AI)-based language detection, translation, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition (NER). This method automatically generates geospatial and location intelligence on both ESRI ArcGIS Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps. The proposed system was deployed from 1 January 2020 to 6 February 2022 to analyze 1.5 million tweets. During this 25-month period, 95K locations were successfully identified and mapped using data of 271,885 Twitter handles. With an overall 90% precision, recall, and F 1 score, along with 97% accuracy, the proposed system reports the most accurate system to produce geospatial intelligence directly from live Twitter feeds of political leaders with AI. Keywords: sentiment analysis on political tweets; named entity recognition on political tweets; geospatial intelligence; analyzing tweets of political leaders; big data processing of social media 1. Introduction As of July 2021, 5.2 billion people have access to the internet, representing 65% of the global population [1]. Many of these people have access to social media and are constantly posting updates on their social media accounts. Hence, in every minute Facebook users share 240,000 photos, Facebook live receives 44,000,000 views, Instagram users share 65,000 photos, YouTube users stream 694,000 h of videos, Snapchat users send 2,000,000 Snapchats, and Twitter users post 575,000 tweets, generating a massive volume of big data [1]. A study in 2020 found that there are 1089 active Twitter accounts of heads of states, ministers, diplomats, and political leaders out of which 632 have been verified by Twitter [2]. Derogatory remarks in social media by political leaders are reacted to and retweeted since the public is drawn to negative events and news reports [3]. For example, A tweet by Donald Trump at 9:43 p.m. on 20 July 2020 states, “We are united in our effort to defeat the invisible China virus, and many people say that it is patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more patriotic than me, your favorite president” [2]. This tweet almost instantly reached 20 million or 23% of the total followers (i.e., 88 million) of Donald Trump [2]. From then, the followers retweeted, reacted, and shared this view, creating a global impact on the country mentioned within the tweet. Measuring the impact of social media posts on a particular nation, country, or state is significant for any nation since diplomatic ties and geopolitical situations are severely affected by derogatory and negative posts by political leaders. Even though there has been Information 2022, 13, 120. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13030120 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information