Mapping emotions in social media and the press: A three-dimensional analysis of emotional references to transport in Belgian towns

Media representation of mobility issues, and their reception among citizens, shapes public attitudes toward transport services (Drexler & Hagen, 2023; Scherrer, 2023). In Wallonia (Belgium), where major urban centres intermingle with small towns (Thomas et al., 2008), bus problems such as rush hour crowding, limited frequency, safety issues and strikes pose challenges. These issues are constructed and perceived differently across press and social media (Scherrer, 2023), eliciting emotions from frustration and anger to surprise and delight. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine how speaker identity and power relations shape representations of the bus. Our corpus comprises 575 press narratives and 657 tweets from 2022 and 2023 in Wallonia (then Twitter, now X). We combine computational spatial identification and thematic labelling with manual polarity coding. First, we analyse spatialised narratives, i.e. place-referenced messages (cities or municipalities) with emotional markers (word choice, polarity, emojis). We show how metaphors evoke emotions and reveal fragmentation between media discourse and public opinion in representing transport. We further reveal how metaphors, emojis and hashtags about buses cast cities as either drivers of change or sites of failure. Second, thematic analysis shows a city to town split. In the press, large cities are framed around infrastructure problems, whereas smaller towns appear through residents’ stories of constrained or absent service. On Twitter, discourse on large and midsized cities alternates between service criticism and praise for innovative initiatives. Small towns complain about transport access. Finally, polarity analysis shows that citizen discourse on Twitter is less negative than media coverage. A city’s bus image depends more on message volume than on city size, and lower volumes skew negative. The analysis brings to light three power layers of representation: the media (editorial agendas), cities (mobility policies) and citizens (online experiences). These layers sometimes clash and sometimes reinforce frames shaping public perception.

Affiliations

UCLouvainSSH/ILC/PCOM - Pôle de recherche en communication

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Mentalechta, L., Mac Donough, M., & Cougnon, L.-A. (2026). Mapping emotions in social media and the press: A three-dimensional analysis of emotional references to transport in Belgian towns. IDEA - Interdisciplinary Discourses, Education and Analysis, 6, 17-32. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/273534 (Original work published 2026)