Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agendas aiming to influence voter behaviour. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets of politicians from three European countries and explore the virality of their tweets. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. By utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models, we performed sentiment analysis on hundreds of thousands of tweets collected from members of parliament in Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting differences between political parties as well as between politicians and the general population.

翻译：社交媒体在现代社会的政策制定中已变得极具影响力，尤其是在西方世界，诸如Twitter等平台允许用户关注政治人物，从而使公民更深入地参与政治讨论。同样，政治人物利用Twitter表达观点、就当前议题展开辩论，并宣传其政治议程以影响选民行为。本文尝试分析来自三个欧洲国家政治人物的推文，探究其推文的病毒式传播特征。已有研究表明，传递负面情绪的推文更易被转发。通过运用最先进的预训练语言模型，我们对从希腊、西班牙及英国（包括地方行政机构）国会议员处收集的数十万条推文进行了情感分析。我们通过系统探究并分析高影响力推文与低热度推文之间的差异来实现这一目标。分析结果显示，政治人物带有负面情绪的推文传播范围更广——尤其在近期更为显著，并揭示了不同政党之间以及政治人物与普通民众之间的有趣差异。