Differences in emotional reactions to social media content: The role of location and content type

Individuals in diaspora tend to engage and interact with the people of their origin. Afghans in the 1980s and 90s, still one of the largest diaspora communities, used traditional channels such as Radio and Television to communicate with their loved ones inside Afghanistan. The Internet facilitated changing their mode of communication to near real-Time updates. Diaspora and local communities engage in the same Social Awareness Streams (SAS), but there is a lack of research focusing on difference and similarities of these communities. This paper investigates the differences in emotional disclosure and expression between diaspora and local communities in Afghanistan using data from 'Afghanistan My Passion', the largest public Afghan Facebook community page.We investigate a corpus of 2,165 Persian language words considering the location and gender of the social media user. This work provides the first analysis towards understanding differences in diaspora and local communities' emotional reactions to social media content and extends the body of literature on Persian language sentiment analysis.