Research Paper

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The impact of social noise on social Ó The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/01655515221077347
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Nayana Pampapura Madali

Department of Information Science, University of North Texas, USA

Manar Alsaid
Department of Information Science, University of North Texas, USA

Suliman Hawamdeh
Department of Information Science, University of North Texas, USA

Abstract
Social media has become a platform for information diffusion, voicing concerns of existing inequalities and raising public awareness of
various social and societal issues. Despite the social good, social media has become a fertile ground for spreading misinformation, hate
speech and conspiracy theories. The death of George Floyd in May 2020 triggered a series of protests worldwide in support of the
Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and triggered a debate about equity, inclusion and social justice. The purpose of this study is to
examine the impact of misinformation and social noise on the original intended message of BLM using data from the Twitter hashtag
‘BLM’. Results from topic modelling have shown the strong presence of misinformation and social noise. Such information was most
probably intended to influence, mislead and dilute the original intended message. However, despite the effort to distort the original
message of BLM, results from sentiment analysis show that users’ opinions of the BLM movement remained positive.

Keywords
Black lives matter; equity; inclusion; misinformation; sentiment analysis; social noise; topic modelling

1. Introduction
Advances in information science technologies, such as mobile devices, learning technologies, publishing tools, communi-
cation and socialisation hubs, live streaming and interactive multimedia, have made it possible for people to access a
wealth of information and knowledge that never existed before. While this is considered a blessing for some, for most
people, it is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. The rise of misinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theories,
cyberbullying, fake news and the increased use of unethical artificial intelligence are some of the challenges that we must
deal with [1]. The recent events surrounding the US elections, Black Lives Matter issues and COVID-19 have highlighted
the danger of misinformation and the importance to democratic institutions, science and society [2,3]. Undermining faith
in science and democratic institutions has a long-term effect on human development and progress.
When inaccurate information is spread either intentionally or unintentionally, it is referred to as misinformation [4].
The difficult part is dealing with misinformation when those who are participating in its diffusion are not aware of its
existence. The influence of a user’s personal and relational characteristics on information received through social media
that might confuse, distort or even modify the original message is referred to as social noise [5]. A study of social noise
in misinformation cases is needed, emphasising how it affects disseminating false and harmful information. BLM stands

Corresponding author:
Nayana Pampapura Madali, Department of Information Science, University of North Texas, 3940 North Elm, Suite E292, Denton, TX 76203, USA.
Email: NayanaPampapuraMadali@my.unt.edu
Pampapura Madali et al. 2

for ‘Black Lives Matter’ and is a decentralised political and social movement that protests against police brutality and
racially motivated violence against black citizens. After George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting leading to the
death of African American teen Trayvon Martin, the campaign started with the hashtags ‘#BlackLivesMatter’, ‘#BLM’
and so on, on social media in July 2013 [6]. During the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020, the campaign resurfaced
in the national spotlight and drew even more international attention.
While certain percentages of the people participating in social media discussions can be considered advocates of social
justice causes, many others are engaged in misinformation activities and social noise. The openness of social media plat-
forms allows external parties to infiltrate the conversation and exploit social noise to influence opinion and distort the
original message for political or ideological reasons. The external influence on the American elections in 2016 and 2020
is a good example of the role external players can have on social media users. This study examines how misinformation
and conspiracy theories in the form of social noise impact the original intended message. We hypothesised that the exis-
tence of social noise dilutes, alters and distorts the original intended message. Expanding our understanding of social
noise in the way it is generated, manipulated and spread could help identify and minimise the impact of intended and
harmful misinformation generated by outside players. The study also examines the effects of misinformation and social
noise on social issues, such as equity, inclusion and social justice.
In this article, data related to the BLM movement are collected from Twitter, and sentiment analysis is performed to
understand the sentiments of social media users towards the BLM movement. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and a
biterm model are built and executed, and the keywords related to social noise, misinformation, equity, inclusion and
many others are identified and extracted. Additionally, the associations among the words are explored in this study.

2. Literature review
The first realisation of the power of social media as a platform for protest and social justice started in 2010 with the
Arab Spring and the uprising in Tunisia. People discovered that they have a bigger circle of influence, and their ideas,
messages and posts have a ripple effect on others [7–9]. During the uprising, people used social media to organise pro-
tests, create awareness, share stories and, most importantly, document violence and violate people’s right to exercise
freedom of speech and civic engagement. The role of social media in equity and inclusion that was demonstrated led the
US supreme court to decide to legalise marriage between same-sex couples in 2015 [10]. The Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) work around the #LoveWins was an effective way of using social media with more than 7 million tweets and 1.4
million photos on Instagram [11]. The Me-Too movement (or #MeToo movement) originated in 2006 has been elevated
and has gained momentum in 2017 when famous actresses and high profile female musicians decided to share their
experience with sexual harassment using the hashtag #MeToo [12]. This led to more awareness about sexual harassment
issues and the conviction of several well-known figures in the Hollywood and the movies industry.
BLM started in 2013 with the use of hashtags, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #BLM and others, following the murder of
Trayvon Martin. It aimed at protesting and combating anti-black racism and police brutality towards African Americans
[6]. The movement and the hashtags got magnified after the murder of George Floyd when protests and demonstrations
spread around the world calling for equity and social justice. The BLM movement, born in 2013, was indirectly created
out of decades of frustration within the African American community over the legal system’s continual exoneration of
those who had taken black lives [13]. Ince et al. [14] studied the social media presence in BLM. In their article, the
authors analysed different hashtags related to BLM and found that the ‘hashtags mention solidarity or approval of the
movement, refer to police violence, mention movement tactics, mention Ferguson or express counter-movement senti-
ments’. Francis [15], in his paper, mentions that the global rallying cry in the BLM protests alerts us to the urgency for
transformative change in all spheres. As Brock [16] mentioned in his paper ‘twitter’s combination of brevity, multi-
platform access and feedback mechanisms has enabled it to gain mindshare far out of proportion to its actual user base,
including an extraordinary number of black users’.
Recent events in the United States and around the world have highlighted the danger of spreading misinformation and
fake news on the Internet and social media [17]. The seriousness of the problem has prompted calls from politicians and
legislators for technology companies to identify and stop the spread of misinformation. Efforts are being made by social
media companies to counter the effect of misinformation by trying to introduce a combination of technical and non-
technical measures. For example, Google and Facebook introduced a community-driven approach that allows users to
flag false content to correct the newsfeed [18]. However, the effectiveness of such measures will depend largely on the
ability to distinguish disinformation and misinformation created with the intent to harm from noise created and prolifer-
ated by users for different reasons. Misinformation in the form of social noise could occur for several reasons, including
the selective and partial representation of the original information without the intent to harm [5,19]. Social media users
tend to operate in groups that could foster confirmation bias, segregation and polarisation. This can also lead to the

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Pampapura Madali et al. 3

Table 1. Social noise constructs identified by Zimmerman.

Construct Definition

Image curation
Relationship management
Conflict engagement
Cultural agency
Is the effort by a social media user, consciously or unconsciously, to craft their online identities
Refers to a user’s understanding of their roles and responsibilities within social institutions and the
level of confidence in their personal beliefs
Is the level of social conflict with which a user is comfortable
Is characterised by civic participation in social issues and is exhibited by individuals who believe in their
own power to be heard and to shape culture and beliefs

proliferation of biased narratives and unsubstantiated rumours, mistrust and paranoia that impact the quality of the infor-
mation [20]. Not everyone in the group is aware of the impact of their action or the extent by which their participation is
contributing to the problem of misinformation and social noise.
Social noise occurs when people interact differently with information on social media than if they encountered it pri-
vately due to the awareness of being observed by peers, colleagues, family and other members of their social network.
Under the influence of social noise, a user may tamper their communication based on external cues from their social net-
work regarding what behaviour is acceptable or desirable, consciously or unconsciously attempting to present themselves
more desirably and increase their social capital within the network [19,21]. For example, if a well-respected friend posts
a news article supporting a social issue that is generally in line with the users’ belief system, the user might indicate sup-
port by ‘liking’ the post without fully understanding the issues being discussed. Similarly, in an effort to maintain impor-
tant relationships and avoid controversy, social media users might not indicate their true opinion in opposition to the
issue, and instead, they pretend they agree on the issues [22–24]. Social noise can influence users’ behaviour and push
them to participate in conversations without knowing or understanding the issues at stake.
While misinformation in the form of doctrine, denial of the truth, manipulation of historical information and propa-
ganda is considered a problem that needs to be dealt with, social media’s role in the spread of misinformation is evident
[25–27]. Recent remarks by President Joe Biden regarding ‘misinformation killing people’ referring to misinformation
regarding the COVID-19 vaccine indicate the seriousness of the problem and the need for social media companies to
take steps to control misinformation on their platforms [28]. Unfortunately, this is a complex problem given the openness
of social media platforms and the challenges in identifying misinformation from social noise. To deal with the problem
of misinformation, there is a need to understand why ordinary people might participate in the spread of misinformation.
A study by the MIT lab found that false and manipulated information spread 70% faster on social media than authentic
information [29]. Most people forward social media messages and retweet misinformation as a social event without rea-
lising that the information being sent might be manipulated or fake. People engaged in social noise as part of image cura-
tion, relationship management, conflict engagement or cultural agency are less probably to question the accuracy or the
validity of the information they are dealing with [19].
Zimmerman [19] introduced the concept of social noise in an attempt to understand user information behaviour in
social media and the type of content posted under certain circumstances that constitute social noise. She defines social
noise as being made up of four constructs that could help in explaining the spread of misinformation. The four constructs
are image curation, relationship management, conflict engagement and cultural agency. Image curation is defined as an
attempt by social media users to knowingly or unknowingly craft their online identity and create a personal exhibition
that satisfies them [30]. Relationship management refers to a user’s desire to build a community with individuals or
groups with profound importance or high social value to them. This can be driven by a desire to be included as a mem-
ber of a particular group (whether formal or informal) or to connect with and maintain good relationships with other
people [21]. There are various reasons why people might participate in certain discussions on social media or retweet
certain messages or content without understanding the broader implication of their actions. The social noise categories
identified by Zimmerman are described in Table 1.

3. Methodology
To perform content analysis on data extracted from social media in an unstructured format, we use two methods of data
analysis: sentiment analysis and topic modelling. Sentiment analysis is a popular text analysis technique that detects
polarity (e.g. a positive, neutral or negative opinion) within the text, a whole document, paragraph, sentence or clause.
Sometimes, it is combined with the content analysis for topic discovery and opinion mining [31]. Emotion detection is

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Pampapura Madali et al. 4

Figure 1. BLM daily tweet frequency chart.

another type of sentiment analysis aimed at detecting emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger and so on [32].
Sentiment analysis can also indicate whether the response is fact-based and the degree to which the opinion reflects the
respondent’s personal opinion. Routray et al. [33] reviewed different aspects of sentiment analysis for text documents
and highlighted four different research challenges: subjectivity classification, word sentiment classification, document
sentiment classification and opinion extraction.
Topic modelling is one of the methods used to discover topics across various text documents. These topics are abstract
in nature, that is, words related to each other form a topic. There can be multiple topics in an individual document. Topic
modelling helps explore large amounts of text data, find clusters of words, the similarity between documents and discover
abstract topics [34]. LDA is a topic modelling method used to identify the topics and topic keywords in a document. The
basic concept is that documents are interpreted as random mixtures of latent topics, each of which is described by a word
distribution [35]. Biterm is another topic modelling technique, wherein the biterm model will learn about the topics based
on word co-occurrences patterns. It is a word co-occurrence-based topic model that learns topics by modelling patterns of
word-to-word co-occurrences [36].
For this study, the data related to the BLM movement was collected from Twitter. Although the BLM movement has
been in existence since 2013, it was the death of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 that ignited a global protest and gave
momentum for the BLM discussion. Since George Floyd’s death, BLM has become one of the most discussed topics on
social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. For this study, the hashtag ‘BLM’ was used to collect data from
25 May 2020 to 10 June 2020. The time frame was chosen because the hashtag was trending during that time, following
George Floyd’s death and the renewed interest in inequality and social justice.
The google cloud compute engine was used to build a virtual machine instance, which was then configured with a
python environment. This python environment was used to run the python code that extracted the data from Twitter using
Twitter APIs. A total of 104,546 records were extracted for the hashtag ‘BLM’. The data extracted included tweet content
(referred to as tweets), tweet id, user id, language, tweet source, created date, retweet count, reply count, like count and
quote count. Despite the fact that multiple data points about tweets were collected, this study only looked at the tweet
content and the tweet creation date. The rest of the data will be used in future studies. The extracted data were imported
into a local machine, and the analysis was performed. At first, Tableau Software was used to build visualisations for the
data.
Figure 1 depicts the frequency of tweets related to BLM from 25 May to 10 June. Although George Floyd passed
away on 25 May 2020, from the above graph, it is evident that the tweets related to BLM began to acquire traction slowly
after his death. There was a peak on 31 May, which was the day when George Floyd’s second autopsy was performed.
The number of tweets tweeted on 3 June grew once more because the charge against the officers responsible for George
Floyd’s death was upgraded on that day. In addition, more tweets were tweeted on 8 June because George Floyd’s body

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Pampapura Madali et al. 5

Figure 2. BLM hourly tweet frequency.

was on display in his hometown for the public. It is evident from Figure 1 that anytime there was news about George
Floyd’s death, users tweeted about BLM, linking George Floyd’s tragedy to the BLM movement.
Figure 2 represents the number of tweets tweeted between 25 May and 10 June on an hourly basis. Majority of the
tweets were tweeted between 3 p.m. and 12 a.m., as shown in Figure 2.
After creating the visualisations in Tableau, the data was cleaned by loading the data file into a python data frame and
removing all the unnecessary text and symbols from the tweet content column. Exploratory data analysis was performed
to analyse the dataset and summarise their main characteristics using visual methods. Furthermore, sentiment analysis
was performed to identify the user’s sentiment towards the tweet. Sentiment analysis will reveal whether the social media
user has a positive, negative or neutral feeling towards the tweet and whether the tweet is fact-based or influenced by the
writer’s personal opinion. To perform sentiment analysis, the textblob python library was used. Textblob library is used
to analyse textual data and provides an API that can be used to perform sentiment analysis. Textblob is a more reliable
method because of its extensive sentiment analysis capabilities. Textblob was chosen for reasons, such as accessibility,
lightweight, ease of use and a less oppressive learning curve [37]. Moreover, the Textblob library produces two outputs:
subjectivity and polarity, both appropriate for this study.
Furthermore, data was preprocessed using techniques, such as tokenisation, lemmatisation, n-grams implementation
and speech of tag selection.

• Tokenisation refers to the process of splitting the sentences into words while lowercasing the terms, removing
punctuation, ignoring tokens that are too short and dismissing letter accents.
• Lemmatisation includes removing inflectional endings and returning the base or dictionary form of a word,
known as the lemma. For example, terms, such as ‘used’, ‘using’, and ‘uses’, are all converted to a base word
called ‘use’.
• N-grams implementation is extracting sequences of ‘n’ words that frequently occur in the corpus. Bigrams and
trigrams were created for this study, representing two words and three words in series, respectively.
• Speech of tag selection is the process where part of the speech tag is assigned for each token. For this study, only
those words, which have part of the speech tag as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, were kept for further
analysis.

For topic modelling, the Gensim python library and Mallet toolkit were used to build the LDA model and extract the
topics. Gensim is a python library used for topic modelling, document indexing and similarity retrieval with large text
collections. Mallet toolkit is a java-based package based on machine learning for statistical natural language processing,
document classification, topic modelling and other machine learning applications. The LDA model was run on the tweet
data, and a total of 500 topics were extracted from 104,546 tweets. Each topic had 20 keywords related to the topic. The

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Pampapura Madali et al. 6

Figure 3. Research flow diagram.

keywords were analysed to identify the presence of misinformation and social noise. The selected keywords were then
assigned to different social noise constructs.
Another topic modelling technique, which is the biterm topic modelling (BTM), was also performed for richer results.
The Biterm library was used to build a biterm model. To handle the problem of sparse word co-occurrence at the docu-
ment level, the library explicitly models word co-occurrence patterns across the whole corpus [38]. The biterm model
was run on 104,546 tweet data, and topics were extracted and analysed. The selected keywords were then combined with
LDA keywords and assigned to different social noise constructs.
Furthermore, bigrams were built and analysed, and interesting word associations were discovered from the tweet data.
Figure 3 illustrates the research workflow chart and processes used to complete this research work. The highlighted boxes
represent the stages that led to the production of the results.

4. Results
4.1. Contextual analysis of tweets
Sentiment analysis was carried out on 104,546 tweets. For each tweet, the subjectivity and polarity scores were calcu-
lated. A text can have a subjectivity score between 0 and 1. A text with a subjectivity score of 0 is categorised as objec-
tive or based on facts. A text with a subjectivity score of 1 is classified as subjective or based on personal opinion or
motivated by emotion. The sentiment analysis of the tweets resulted in 76.12% (79,580 tweets) of the tweets being sub-
jective, while 23.88% (24,966 tweets) being objective or focused on facts. This shows that most of the tweets were based
on the personal opinion of the Twitter user. Figure 4 represents the sentiment analysis subjectivity results.
Using sentiment analysis on the data, the polarity score of the data was also calculated. The polarity score helps to
determine the sentiment of the tweet, such as positive or negative, or neutral. For a tweet, the polarity score ranges from
− 1 to 1. A negative sentiment has a polarity score of − 1, whereas a neutral sentiment has a polarity score of 0 and a
positive sentiment has a polarity score of 1. Sentiment analysis on 104,546 tweets resulted in 42.16% (44,076 tweets)
having positive sentiment, 29.60% (30,946 tweets) having neutral sentiment and 28.24% (29,524 tweets) having nega-
tive sentiment. Based on the polarity scores, it can be concluded that most of the tweets in this dataset had positive senti-
ment towards the BLM movement. Figure 5 represents the polarity score results.
While Figure 4 shows that most of the tweets posted are based on the personal opinion of the Twitter user, Figure 5
shows that most of the tweets were positive in nature. Figure 6 depicts the positive, negative and neutral tweet rates over
the data collection period. The chart shows that the number of positive tweets about BLM has always been more signifi-
cant than negative and neutral tweets throughout the data collection period. At the beginning of the data collection period,
the number of negative tweets about BLM was greater than the number of neutral tweets. However, between 3 June and
6 June, the number of negative tweets fell below the number of neutral tweets but subsequently increased during the
remainder of the data collection period.

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Pampapura Madali et al. 7

Figure 4. Sentiment analysis subjectivity score chart.

Figure 5. Sentiment analysis polarity score chart.

4.2. LDA topic modelling

LDA is a generative statistical model that uses an unsupervised machine learning technique. It is used to identify topics
or clusters of keywords. LDA first assumes there are a ‘k’ number of topics across the documents. Documents, in this
case, refer to the extracted tweets containing the BLM hashtag. LDA assigns keywords to different topics by first deter-
mining the number of keywords in the document/tweet and then estimating the probability of a given keyword assigned
to a specific topic. This process is repeated until all the keywords are assigned to their respective topic. An LDA model
was developed for this study and was used to analyse 104,546 tweets extracted containing the BLM hashtag from 25
May 2020 to 10 June 2020. The LDA model identified a total of 500 topics. The reason for choosing 500 topics is
because the dataset is large. Another rationale for selecting 500 topics is that the LDA model’s coherence score for 500
topics is around 0.6, indicating that the topics are of good quality. Each topic consisted of 20 keywords associated with

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Pampapura Madali et al. 8

Figure 6. BLM tweet polarity score chart on a daily basis.

Figure 7. Word Cloud showing dominant keywords.

the topic. The topic and its keywords were then analysed further to determine the dominant keyword or construct repre-
senting a specific area of interest. Some of the areas identified include equity, inclusion, justice, racism, riots, violence
and so on. Figure 7 shows dominant keywords that characterised the discussion on the BLM hashtag.

4.3. Biterm topic modelling

BTM is a form of topic modelling technique that is used to locate topics in collections of short texts. The word
co-occurrence is used by the biterm topic model to identify the topics. A BTM used word occurrences to identify topics
by modelling word-to-word co-occurrences patterns commonly referred to as biterms [36]. From these patterns, it learns
how to model a topic and its keywords. LDA and biterm vary in the approach and capabilities. While LDA employs
word-to-document co-occurrences, biterm uses word-to-word co-occurrences. Both LDA and biterm are used to identify
topics and its associated keywords that represent a specific area of interest or a category. Some of the areas identified
reflect or create a positive image of ‘BLM’ as a social justice movement which is listed in Table 2.
The existence of certain keywords or categories as listed in Table 3 reflects negatively and creates a negative image of
BLM as a violent movement.

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Table 2. Categories that create a positive image about BLM.

Categories/keyword Related terms

Equity equitable, equivalent, identity, humanity, equality, equally, equal, respect, uniting
Inclusion inclusive, integrity, include, involve, involvement, recognise, supporting, accept, nurtured, extend
Justice social justice, injustice, court justice, reform
Victim victimhood, suffer, suffering, loss, accused
Peace peaceful, peacefully, peaceful protest
Inequality indifferent, inequality, inequity, wrongly, mistreat, misconduct, leftist, humiliation, biased, bias, disorder,
discrediting, inhuman, privilege

Table 3. Categories that create a negative image about BLM.

Categories/keyword Related terms

Violence violently, suppress, suppression, uncomfortable, police violence, brutality, cyberbullying, ruthless, vandalism,
attack, abuses, attacked, upheaval, ignorant, oppressor
Protest protester, protesting, demonstration, activists, movement, demands, support, antifa
Exclusion unacceptable, offensive, revolution, revolutionary, exclude, divide, discriminate, discrimination, discriminatory,
different, isolate
Racism supremacist, supremacy, race, racial, racism, racist, racistinchief, radical
Riots riotusa, revolt, outrage, disrupt, destroy, riot, rioter, rioting, revenge, loot, looters, escalate

Figure 8. The number of tweets related to each of the categories.

Figure 8 shows the number of tweets corresponding to each of these categories or areas. The study results show that
people who were tweeting about #BLM refer to being treated unequally or differently and are asking for equity, peace
and justice. However, strong terms, such as violence, riots and protest, could be linked to misinformation and social

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Pampapura Madali et al. 10

Figure 9. Network graph representing term association between dominantly used terms.

noise. While certain tweets could indicate people opposing the discussion and their role might be to spread misinforma-
tion and cause trouble. A large number of other participants going along might have other motives for being there, which
can amount to social noise.

4.4. Word associations

Word associations aid comprehension of the words that are linked together. Figure 9 is an example of the type of net-
work diagram created to better understand the relationships between the dominant keywords in the BLM data. From
Figure 9, it can be inferred that the word ‘blm’ is the centre of all the tweet data and this is because the data used in this
research are about BLM movement. Also, the keyword ‘black’ forms the other centre of the network graph meaning the
hashtag BLM was mainly used in reference to black people. It is interesting to know that the ‘black’ keyword is directly
connected to the other keywords, such as justice, white, racism, violence, police and support. From Figure 9 network
graph, we can see that the term police and the term white seem to be more associated with negative terms, such as racist,
supremacy and brutality. Figure 9 is an interactive graph built using the pyvis library. The link to the interactive graph is
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13LK4iRJKk_td7T5wSKydzkadX4X9N33H/view?usp=sharing (Note: The file needs to
be downloaded to access the graph).

4.5. Word associations using Bigrams

Bigrams refers to the combination of two words. As a part of further data analysis, for the entire tweet data, bigrams were
constructed. The frequently occurring bigrams were then analysed, and interesting word associations of the data were
made for the tweet data. Table 4 shows the top 36 bigrams in the data.

5. Discussion
The results have shown that the existence of social noise can affect the original message by diluting the focus or chang-
ing the subject to distort the original intended message through the spread of misinformation. From the topic modelling

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Pampapura Madali et al. 11

Table 4. Top 36 bigrams in the data.

Bigrams/words Association Count Bigrams/words Association Count

(‘blm’, ‘protests’) 1601 (‘racial’, ‘inequality’) 55

(‘police’, ‘brutality’) 1529 (‘hate’, ‘white’) 50
(‘systemic’, ‘racism’) 526 (‘black’, ‘culture’) 49
(‘peaceful’, ‘protest’) 441 (‘victims’, ‘police’) 43
(‘justice’, ‘george’) 410 (‘racial’, ‘discrimination’) 39
(‘police’, ‘violence’) 321 (‘racism’, ‘discrimination’) 39
(‘justice’, ‘blm’) 251 (‘blm’, ‘political’) 38
(‘blm’, ‘policebrutality’) 246 (‘racial’, ‘bias’) 38
(‘justice’, ‘peace’) 209 (‘revolution’, ‘blm’) 37
(‘racism’, ‘police’) 189 (‘police’, ‘misconduct’) 35
(‘racial’, ‘injustice’) 172 (‘blm’, ‘socialjustice’) 32
(‘demand’, ‘justice’) 153 (‘equity’, ‘fairness’) 32
(‘end’, ‘racism’) 121 (‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’) 30
(‘equality’, ‘blm’) 90 (‘white’, ‘leftists’) 28
(‘blm’, ‘antiracism’) 82 (‘cultural’, ‘revolution’) 17
(‘blm’, ‘endracism’) 76 (‘identity’, ‘politics’) 17
(‘hate’, ‘blm’) 63 (‘humiliate’, ‘police’) 15
(‘equal’, ‘rights’) 55 (‘racial’, ‘division’) 13

Table 5. Social noise constructs with two additional constructs and their keywords.

Construct Definition Sample keywords

Image curation Is the effort by a social media user, consciously or
unconsciously, to craft their online identities
Relationship Refers to a user’s understanding of their roles and
management responsibilities within social institutions and the
level of confidence in their personal beliefs
Conflict engagement Is the level of social conflict with which a user is
comfortable
Cultural agency Is characterised by civic participation in social issues
and is exhibited by individuals who believe in their
own power to be heard and to shape culture and
beliefs
Affiliation and politics Is characterised by loyalty to a political party,
religion or an organisation. This could include
people paid to carry out certain activities or
advertise certain products
Norms and beliefs Is characterised by deep beliefs, culture, ideology,
religion, a cause and so on.
Please, willing, identity, recommend, report, thank,
determination, express
Love, want, help, please, equivalent, humanity,
stoptheviolence, awareness, defence, influence,
mutual aid, absurdity, ordinated, advising
Report, stop, humiliation, mistreat, misconduct,
controversial, discord
radical, recommend, wedemandjustice,
ourlivesmatter, revolution, leadership, diversity,
community, social, systemic
foxnewsisracist, systemicracism, supremacist,
supremacy, racistwhiteleft, fascist, abiding
changeculture, wedemandjustice, equity, inclusion,
fightracism, socialists, communists, anarchists,
conservative, extremist

and data analysis techniques used in this study, we are able to identify a set of keywords that fits the four social noise
constructs/categories identified originally by Zimmerman [19]. The study also identified sets of keywords that did not
match the original four constructs and was initially classified as other. After a close examination of the list of keywords
generated, we used the term association method to better understand the original purpose of the tweets and the context
in which these tweets were generated. This led to the creation of two new social noise constructs.
Based on the analysis of the data and the relationship between various tweets, the researchers decided to create two
additional social noise constructs/categories. The two additional constructs are ‘affiliation and politics’ and ‘norm and
beliefs’. It is observed that most of the social noise generated around these two categories, whether the affiliation and pol-
itics category or the norms and belief category are tribal in nature. People without much thinking or further examination
of the facts tend to agree and forward the original tweets. Both affiliation and politics, and norms and beliefs are deeply
rooted in the culture. Table 5 shows the expanded constructs and categories representing social noise. The table provides

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Pampapura Madali et al. 12

definitions of each construct and sample keywords used to indicate or describe each construct. Further studies are needed
to understand the factors that motivate people to participate in misinformation or social noise.
On 26 May, a Twitter user tweeted, ‘How is it we are still dealing with this? How long would it take to solve the prob-
lem if a Black man did this to a cop? STOP IT! The 4 cops involved were fired. They should all be jailed for life for
murder. #BLM’ This is an example of image curation and cultural agency, in which a Twitter user is constructing their
online persona while also participating in social concerns to get their opinions heard. Another tweet read, ‘Joe Biden has
been part of the system for 40 years. The system is broken. Which is exactly why I vote for Donald Trump. Criminal
reform. More black jobs than any point in history. Record funding for black colleges. #GeorgeFloydWasMurdered
#blm.’
This tweet is an example of political affiliation, in which the Twitter user declares their support for a political Party.
The Twitter user, however, uses the BLM movement to promote a political Party, which is the strong proof of social
noise.
The term association provides a better understanding of the context in which terms within the tweets are used. Term
association and based on the repeated occurrences of the terms in the tweets measure the distance between certain con-
cepts visually. As illustrated in Figure 9, the terms ‘blm’ and ‘black’ are located at the centre of the graph indicating that
these are the two terms that have the highest occurrence in the dataset. Using bigrams to create word associations
(Table 4) helps in arriving at some of the observations listed below.

• From the term associations, it is evident that the term ‘BLM’ was most commonly used with the word ‘protests’.
From this, it can be understood that people generally meant BLM protest when they tweeted about it. Justice,
police brutality, equality, antiracism, end racism, hate, political, revolution and social justice were also frequently
associated with the word ‘BLM’. These associations indicate that the term ‘BLM’ was primarily used to refer to
and identify with police brutality and inequality towards black people.
• The words brutality, violence, racism, victims, misconduct and humiliate were frequently associated with the
word ‘police’. It is evident from this that individuals had a negative perception of the word ‘police’ and that the
term ‘police’ was mainly used to refer to police aggression against black people.
• The words systematic, injustice, end, inequality, discrimination, bias and division were mainly associated with
words having the base word ‘race’. This demonstrates that the terms ‘racism’ and ‘racial’ were primarily used to
refer to racism towards black people in this BLM dataset.
• Many people used the term BLM to refer to it as a peaceful protest because the word protest was mainly con-
nected with the word ‘peaceful’.
• The words George, peace and demand were usually connected with the phrase ‘justice’. It can be concluded that
the word ‘justice’ was employed to seek/demand justice for George Floyd.
• Equal and equity were linked to the word’s rights and fairness, respectively, implying that BLM was employed to
promote equality.
• The word ‘white’ was mainly associated with the phrase’s ‘hate’ and ‘leftists’, hence many people referred to
white people as ‘leftists’ and ‘haters’. The phrase ‘culture’ was associated with the word black; therefore, black
was used to refer to culture.
• It is also apparent from the bigrams table that the concepts of diversity and culture were linked to inclusion and
revolution.
• Another noteworthy finding is that the phrase ‘identity’ was commonly used in conjunction with the term ‘poli-
tics’, implying that individuals used the term politics with identity, which forms the basis for the ‘affiliation and
politics’ construct.

Sentiment analysis is one of the most well-studied methods for determining the underlying sentiment, views of, atti-
tudes towards a situation or opinions in agreeing or disagreeing. As an example, sentiment study of the US 2016 presi-
dential election using Textblob revealed that Hillary Clinton received the most significant number of positive tweets,
whereas tweets about Bernie Sanders were primarily based on the Twitter users’ personal opinions [39]. In this study,
sentiment analysis helps us to better understand Twiiter users views, attitude and opinion about the BLM movement.
Based on the subjectivity and polarity scores shown in the results section, we can see that most of the tweets connected
to the BLM data were based on the Twitter user’s personal opinions, and many Twitter users had positive sentiments
about the BLM movement. However, the existence of social noise and misinformation on social media do affect the
overall sentiment. The problem with social noise is that most people are not aware of their role as participants in spread-
ing misinformation for one or more of the reasons we listed in the social noise constructs in Table 5.

Journal of Information Science, 2022, pp. 1–15 Ó The Author(s), DOI: 10.1177/01655515221077347
Pampapura Madali et al. 13

5. Conclusion
Sentiment analysis and topic modelling are interesting data analytics techniques used to process and mine large amounts
of data. In this article, we examined the impact of social noise on the original intended message in the context of BLM
movement data downloaded from Twitter. The study examined the notion of social noise where the participant engaged
in social noise might unintentionally alter or dilute the original intended message of the movement. The sentiment analy-
sis and topic modelling were performed on the 104,546 tweets data extracted for the ‘BLM’ hashtag from 25 May 2020
to 10 June 2020. The sentiment analysis of the tweet results shows 76.12% (79,580 tweets) of the tweets were subjective,
while 23.88% (24,966 tweets) were objective or focused on facts. Further polarity scores revealed that 42.16% (44,076
tweets) were positive statements, 29.60% (30,946 tweets) were neutral statements and 28.24% (29,524 tweets) were neg-
ative statements.
The sentiment analysis results showed that most of the tweets were based on Twitter user’s personal opinions and that
the majority of Twitter users had a favourable opinion about the BLM movement. Even though in the beginning of the
data collection period, the number of negative tweets about BLM was more than the number of neutral tweets, during
the period from 3 June to 6 June, the number of negative tweets fell below the number of neutral tweets and subsequently
increased during the remainder of the data collection period. This can be attributed to possibly a decline in social noise
and misinformation over time.
LDA and BTM techniques are used to identify keywords and terms that indicate the existence of social noise. The
results show that the two methods used produced topics that are helpful in identifying keywords and terms that indicate
the existence of social noise constructs. However, the Biterm method which is normally used for classifying short mes-
sages and consists of two word co-occurring to produce better results than the LDA. The analysis of the identified topics
together with the results from term association using Bigram network graph results in identifying two additional con-
structs, namely ‘affiliation and politics’ and ‘norms and beliefs’. Such construct could be helpful in explaining social
noise and the role that might play in diluting or altering the original intended message. This is necessary in dealing with
misinformation that is generated by users who did not have the intent to create or spread misinformation. However, their
unintentional participation and action in forwarding and spreading misinformation can contribute greatly to the social
noise problem.

6. Limitations and further studies

While this study analysed the data related to hashtag BLM to determine misinformation and social noise, it has some
limitations. For instance, images, videos and emojis were removed from the tweets during the data preprocessing stage.
Furthermore, the data for this study were collected from 25 May 2020 to 10 June 2020. A more comprehensive study
over a more extended period would create a richer picture and enable to dig deeper into the impact of misinformation
and social noise on the intended message of movements, such as BLM.
Further studies using more advanced methods, such as natural language processing, or deep learning models using
other social media platforms, such as Facebook, will help better understand the impact of social noise and misinforma-
tion. The topic modelling technique used in this article is also limited to the LDA and biterm methods. Different topic
modelling techniques, such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) and k-means clustering, can be used for further study.
Furthermore, emotions analysis can be applied to identify emotions, such as anger, sadness and happiness for each tweet.
It is also important to note that this study is part of an ongoing research project to understand social noise and its impact
on social media users.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs
Nayana Pampapura Madali https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7707-1304
Manar Alsaid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8172-032X
Suliman Hawamdeh https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7018-6945

Journal of Information Science, 2022, pp. 1–15 Ó The Author(s), DOI: 10.1177/01655515221077347
Pampapura Madali et al. 14

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