Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
online public discourse
thematic analysis
Bluesky
Trump administration
executive orders
Echoes in the Sky: Computational Thematic Analysis of Online Public Discourse on Bluesky Across Trump's Reelection
🤖 AI Summary
This study examines public discourse on the Bluesky platform from 2019 to 2026 surrounding Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and policy agenda, uncovering its thematic structure and affective evolution. Leveraging historical API data, the authors collected 38.5 million English-language posts containing Trump-related keywords and employed a large language model–assisted clustering pipeline, complemented by manual validation and sentiment analysis, to achieve the first interpretable, large-scale topic discovery of political discourse on Bluesky. By linking public discussions to the texts of 258 executive orders, the research identifies 14 public discourse themes and 19 policy-aligned themes, revealing governance, identity, and national security as dominant concerns. The analysis further demonstrates a marked increase in negative sentiment, highlighting dynamic shifts in issue salience and growing affective polarization.
📝 Abstract
As political disruption intensifies online discourse, Bluesky has become an important platform for political discussion and public reaction. In this study, we examine large-scale discourse on Bluesky related to U.S. policy developments associated with the Trump administration. Using the historical retrieval API, we collected all available posts matching Trump and related keywords from 2019 to 2026, yielding 38.5 million posts. We leverage a large language model (LLM)-assisted clustering pipeline, combined with human validation, to identify 14 interpretable thematic domains in English-language posts and 19 thematic categories across 258 executive orders (EOs) signed between January 20, 2025, and May 1, 2026. Our findings identify several dominant themes in Bluesky discourse, including executive governance, political identity, and national security, as well as recurring themes in EOs, including executive task forces, border enforcement, and foreign policy. We also find substantial variation in the persistence and volatility of issue attention, accompanied by an increasing proportion of negative sentiment over time. The dataset and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/Sensify-Lab/Echoes-in-the-Sky
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
LLM-assisted clustering
computational thematic analysis
online public discourse
executive orders
hybrid human-AI validation
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
💼 Related Jobs
