Analyzing Public Sentiment and Public Opinion of the Caliphate Issue in Indonesia: Twitter Analytics Evidence

In Indonesia, there is a substantial amount of public discourse about the caliphate, an Islamic form of government. In 2022, there were 165,263 public tweets on the social media platform Twitter that included the Indonesian word for caliphate (khilafah). Conversations on topics of the caliphate in Indonesia often lead to controversial debate even within the Muslim community itself. The public debates have been related to differences of public perception and public faith. This study aims to describe the public sentiment on Twitter in Indonesia. We examined public perception and engagement on Twitter from January 1 to December 31, 2022, regarding the caliphate issues based on sentiment analysis. This study analyzed Twitter data using machine learning from a third-party platform with natural language processing (NLP) process to examine public sentiment about the caliphate. The sentiment analysis results show that 60% of conversations discussing the caliphate in Indonesia are positive, 38% convey negative sentiments, and 3% convey neutral sentiments. The majority of tweets discussing the caliphate issue were positive tweets.