Track: Information Systems and Information Technology

Abstract

Chile is one of the most ageing countries in South America. By 2050, the population over 60 will be 31.2% reaching 6.9 million older adults. Another significant increase in the past five years has been the use of social media. According to data from 2020, the use of social networks has grown between 180-200% since the pandemic. This study explores which topics are related to older adults and what is said about them on massive media Twitter accounts and from influential broadcasters. Our analysis platform is Twitter, and the method of analysis is a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). With this method, we search for topics related to older adults in the past four years in Chile using keywords. This exam was possible thanks to LDAtweetsES, a graphical interface for topics that analyses tweets in Spanish. The results indicate a total of nine different topics included in 10.139 tweets. These topics were classified into different categories associated with older adults: violence, opinion, economics, and COVID-19. The interpretation of the topics led to an emotional analysis including eight emotions: anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust. Results exposed a strong presence of trust and fear in all the topics, with 18% of the existence of fear in pandemic-related topics and 32% of the company of trust in pension-related topics. This was made possible through searching for terms linked to each emotion in the study of tweets.