Measuring the Similarities of Twitter Hashtags for Agriculture in the Czech Language

Our paper presents first analysis of Czech Twitter content within the agriculture context. We deployed textual analysis of more than 240,000 tweets over 2014-2019 hashtags that were, according to Google Trends, most trending and related to Czech agriculture such as #dotace, #repka, or #bionafta – both in Czech and English language. Besides descriptive statistics of the tweet dataset, we visualized keyword correlations which revealed strong focus of the discourse on rapeseed, biofuel and the prime minister Andrej Babiš. Owing to inherent political context of the given hashtags, we found spikes in topics which followed the public attention to the topics in mass media. We also found several accounts that produces high traffic for certain hashtags in Czech, yet those accounts were located abroad. Consistent with other studies, a high proportion of tweets was generated by unverified accounts that might be bots – automated accounts. We propose to conduct semantic analysis of a broader dataset over the main social media platforms in the Czech Republic