Analyzing Public Sentiment Towards Islamic Finance Through Social Media: Using Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data

As a burgeoning alternative to conventional finance, Islamic finance, characterized by its ethical and Shariah-compliant financial offerings, has garnered increasing global attention. This study sought to gauge public sentiment towards Islamic finance by leveraging sentiment analysis on a dataset of tweets amassed between 2007 and 2022. Data extraction from Twitter was performed using keywords pertinent to Islamic finance. The subsequent preprocessing of the tweets facilitated a text analysis, conducted with the aid of the pre-trained Twitter-roBERTa-base model. This model, trained on approximately 124 million tweets and fine-tuned on analogous data, was aptly suited for categorizing the Islamic finance-related tweets into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. The findings primarily showed a neutral sentiment distribution: 57% neutral, 17.9% positive, and 24.8% negative. The term "Interest-free" surfaced as the most commonly associated with Islamic finance, followed by "Profit sharing," "Risk mitigation," and "Islamic banking." The study identified regions such as the United States, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Southeast Asia, the United Kingdom, and other European countries with large Muslim populations as prolific contributors to the Islamic finance discourse on Twitter. Moreover, the study underscored a cultural influence on public sentiment, with Muslim-majority nations predominantly expressing positive views towards Islamic finance, in contrast to the more negative sentiment prevalent in non-Muslim-majority nations. These findings provide valuable insights that could be harnessed to shape marketing and outreach initiatives, devise effective communication strategies, and guide policymakers in promoting awareness of Islamic finance through comprehensive education and awareness programs.