<![CDATA[The alleged sugar import corruption case involving Tom Lembong has become one of the most widely discussed public issues on social media, generating diverse reactions. This phenomenon illustrates how public opinion on legal issues is often influenced by perceptions of the public figures involved. This study aims to analyze public sentiment regarding the case on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). The dataset consists of 1,802 tweets collected through a crawling process using the X API with the keyword “Tom Lembong.” The research stages include data cleaning, case folding, text normalization, tokenizing, stopword removal, stemming, sentiment labeling using a lexicon-based approach, and feature extraction with the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method. The prepared dataset was then tested using three classification algorithms: Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest. The results show that the SVM algorithm achieved the highest accuracy (84%), followed by Random Forest (80%) and Naïve Bayes (76%). Based on the sentiment labeling results, positive sentiment dominated with 61%, while negative sentiment accounted for 39%. Although the analyzed issue concerns an alleged corruption case, the dominance of positive sentiment indicates that public opinion tends to focus on Tom Lembong’s personal image or public track record, which is viewed positively rather than on the substance of the legal allegations. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the SVM algorithm in analyzing high-dimensional text and provide insights into how public perception of legal issues can be influenced by image factors and the socio-political context on social media.]]>
