The 2022 Energy Crisis: Topic Modelling and Sentiment Analysis of the Italian Twitter Discourse

Abstract Throughout 2022, the energy crisis has become a focal point in public discussions, receiving widespread attention within the media. Twitter has provided a significant avenue for individuals to participate in and shape the discourse by sharing messages with diverse types of content. This study explores a set of tweets to gain insights into how Italian-speaking users on the platform perceived and discussed the energy crisis and its associated facets. We primarily aim to uncover the most prominent topics, through the application of unsupervised topic modelling. Five main themes were identified: Energy Markets Dynamics, Ukraine Crisis, concerns over Energy Supply, Italian Politics, and Household Energy Consumption. By leveraging topic-tweet associations, we examined the prevalence of themes across the entire collection and analysed its evolution over time. In addition, a sentiment analysis was conducted on the same set of messages, following a dictionary-based approach. The distributions of sentiment scores across tweets revealed that the predominant topic of a tweet is associated with variations in sentiment, suggesting that certain themes evoke more strongly negative reactions than others. Finally, the economic analysis shows that Twitter sentiment co-moves with ISTAT consumer and business confidence indicators. The prevalence of discussions concerning household energy consumption and energy supplies also follows fluctuations in energy prices and consumption, suggesting that social-media discourse may provide timely signals of changing economic conditions during an energy crisis.