Measuring Anti-Americanism with LLMs
Working Paper
Yunus Emre Tapan (Northeastern University) · Zeynep Elif Koç (Atilim University) · Tuba Unlu Bilgic (University of St Thomas)
Turkey has one of the lowest U.S. favorability ratings in the world — just 18%. But how much anti-Americanism exists matters less than what kind it is: policy criticism rooted in sovereignty concerns can be addressed through diplomacy; entrenched prejudice attributing malevolence to American character cannot. We classify nearly 96,000 Turkish-language tweets across 13 years and find that anti-Americanism is overwhelmingly political (85%) — not religious, not cultural, not civilizational. But roughly 30% of discourse pairs political substance with conspiratorial framing, creating a mechanism by which correctable opinion hardens into correction-resistant distrust. …Different bilateral crises activate different dimensional signatures: the Gezi protests triggered a conspiratorial peak near 75%; the Jerusalem recognition triggered a religious spike; the 2018 lira crash triggered economic framing. And conspiratorial framing surges again after 2020, even as political content holds steady — suggesting the opinion-to-distrust mechanism is intensifying, not receding. Anti-Americanism isn’t one thing — it’s a shifting composite, and its composition determines whether diplomacy can reach it.
Concept: Anti-Americanism
Methods: LLM-based Multilabel Classification
Data: 95,933 tweets, 2008–2021
Figure: Dimensional signatures of anti-Americanism shift across bilateral crises — Gezi protests trigger conspiracy spikes, Jerusalem recognition triggers religious framing, and the 2018 lira crash triggers economic framing.