Sentiment Analysis provides an opportunity to understand the subject(s), especially in the digital
age, due to an abundance of public data and effective algorithms. Cybersecurity is a subject
where opinions are plentiful and differing in the public domain. This descriptive research
analyzed cybersecurity content on Twitter and Reddit to measure its sentiment, positive or
negative, or neutral. The data from Twitter and Reddit was amassed via technology-specific
APIs during a selected timeframe to create datasets, which were then analyzed individually for
their sentiment by VADER, an NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithm. A random
sample of cybersecurity content (ten tweets and posts) was also classified for sentiments by
twenty human annotators to evaluate the performance of VADER. Cybersecurity content on
Twitter was at least 48% positive, and Reddit was at least 26.5% positive. The positive or
neutral content far outweighed negative sentiments across both platforms. When compared to
human classification, which was considered the standard or source of truth, VADER produced
60% accuracy for Twitter and 70% for Reddit in assessing the sentiment; in other words, some
agreement between algorithm and human classifiers. Overall, the goal was to explore an
uninhibited research topic about cybersecurity sentiment.