Sentiment Analysis On Social Media During Crisis Events: The Case Of Kahramanmaraş Earthquake

In today's world, using social media daily has become crucial. Social media platforms provide strong public forums where users can clearly express their thoughts and emotions to huge audiences on a range of subjects. One of the important debates of recent times is whether social media can be used to manage disasters and crises. To address this issue, this study took the February 6, 2023, Kahramanmaraş earthquake, one of the most important disasters of recent times, and examined the emotions people experienced during and after disasters by conducting sentiment analysis. The dataset includes tweets shared on Twitter from February 7-26, 2023. Word cloud and word frequency techniques have been used to visualize and analyze the most frequently occurring words in the dataset. Sentiment analysis was performed. The results revealed that negative words constituted 7.79% of the dataset, while positive words made up 5.2%. This suggests that while there was a significant presence of positive sentiments, the predominant emotional response was negative revealing that most of the data contained negative emotions as expected.