# Sympathy over Polarization: A Computational Discourse Analysis of Social Media Posts about the July 2024 Trump Assassination Attempt

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [TweetEval: Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12421/) (2020)
- [ChatGPT in education: A discourse analysis of worries and concerns on social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02201/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Unmasking Digital Falsehoods: A Comparative Analysis of LLM-Based Misinformation Detection Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00724/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

On July 13, 2024, at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, someone attempted to assassinate Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. This attempt sparked a large-scale discussion on social media. We collected posts from X (formerly known as Twitter) one week before and after the assassination attempt and aimed to model the short-term effects of such a ``shock'' on public opinions and discussion topics. Specifically, our study addresses three key questions: first, we investigate how public sentiment toward Donald Trump shifts over time and across regions (RQ1) and examine whether the assassination attempt itself significantly affects public attitudes, independent of the existing political alignments (RQ2). Finally, we explore the major themes in online conversations before and after the crisis, illustrating how discussion topics evolved in response to this politically charged event (RQ3). By integrating large language model-based sentiment analysis, difference-in-differences modeling, and topic modeling techniques, we find that following the attempt the public response was broadly sympathetic to Trump rather than polarizing, despite baseline ideological and regional disparities.