Kim-Putin Summit
Posted by James Zhang
Friday, April 26, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s private train left Russian city Vladivostok signaled the end of Kim-Putin summit. Since Kim’s first meeting with Russian president Putin has something to do with denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, it has significance in terms of maintaining peace in East Asia. What American public so far has reacted to Kim-Putin summit? Let’s find out.
In the past week, the overall volume of social media conversation regarding Kim-Putin Summit is 3,200 posts. A majority of them is from Twitter. On April 25, when the summit was taking place, the social media conversation reached its peak.
With regard to Kim-Putin summit, traditional media such as Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal along with the official Twitter account of Department of State are three top influencers in terms of leading the social media conversation.
The most frequently mentioned words regarding this summit are “denuclearization,” “Korea,” “summit,” “Korean,” “guarantees,” “sanctions,” and “Kim-Putin.” Specifically, speaking to the word “Kim-Putin,” the public either shared basic factual information about the summit or tweeted an analysis of DPRK-Russia relationship from Dr. Mark Parry, who is an expert on US-DPRK relations.
Public online has also expressed their concerns on those “guarantees” for Kim to denuclearize his country. Some tweeted news from NBC that reported that Kim was willing to denuclearize as long as the security of his country could be guaranteed. Some were suspicious of the effectiveness of the talk between Putin and Kim in terms of convincing DPRK quit pursuing nuclear weapon capabilities.
The overall social media sentiment analysis has indicated that most of the online public has expressed positive sentiment towards Kim-Putin Summit. However, since sarcasm might be used in some social media posts, the actual number of positive tweets is expected to be less than what has been shown here.
In general, when discussing the Kim-Putin summit, most of the online public discussed the factual information without attaching implicit connotation to their social media posts, even though some of them had been sarcastic.