Social media content and sentiment analysis on consumer security breaches
| Date | 03 October 2016 |
| Pages | 855-869 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JFC-01-2016-0001 |
| Published date | 03 October 2016 |
| Author | Jianqiang Hao,Hongying Dai |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & Finance,Financial risk/company failure,Financial crime |
Social media content and
sentiment analysis on consumer
security breaches
Jianqiang Hao
First National Bank of Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, and
Hongying Dai
Department of Health Services and Outcomes Research,
Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City,
Missouri, USA
Abstract
Purpose – Security breaches have been arising issues that cast a large amount of nancial losses and
social problems to society and people. Little is known about how social media could be used a
surveillance tool to track messages related to security breaches. This paper aims to ll the gap by
proposing a framework in studying the social media surveillance on security breaches along with an
empirical study to shed light on public attitudes and concerns.
Design/methodology/approach – In this study, the authors propose a framework for real-time
monitoring of public perception to security breach events using social media metadata. Then, an
empirical study was conducted on a sample of 1,13,340 related tweets collected in August 2015 on
Twitter. By text mining a large number of unstructured, real-time information, the authors extracted
topics, opinions and knowledge about security breaches from the general public. The time series
analysis suggests signicant trends for multiple topics and the results from sentiment analysis show a
signicant difference among topics.
Findings – The study conrms that social media monitoring provides a supplementary tool for the
traditional surveys which are costly and time-consuming to track security breaches. Sentiment score
and impact factors are good predictors of real-time public opinions and attitudes to security breaches.
Unusual patterns/events of security breaches can be detected in the early stage, which could prevent
further destruction by raising public awareness.
Research limitations/implications – The sample data were collected from a short period of time on
Twitter. Future study could extend the research to a longer period of time or expand key words search
to observe the sentiment trend, especially before and after large security breaches, and to track various
topics across time.
Practical implications – The ndings could be useful to inform public policy and guide companies
responding to consumer security breaches in shaping public perception.
Originality/value – This study is the rst of its kind to undertake the analysis of social media
(Twitter) content and sentiment on public perception to security breaches.
Keywords Sentiment analysis, Security breach, Social media monitoring MM
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Data breaches have been widespread recently, and The Associated Press (2014) ranked
security breach among the top three business stories. Target, a multinational retailer,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1359-0790.htm
Consumer
security
breaches
855
Journalof Financial Crime
Vol.23 No. 4, 2016
pp.855-869
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1359-0790
DOI 10.1108/JFC-01-2016-0001
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