Insights into social media users’ perceptions of new forms of employment with topic modeling approach

Abstract

Background

Although public discourse on new forms of employment has shifted to X (formerly Twitter), integrated, cross-category evidence remains scarce. This study offers a comparative map of public perceptions by jointly assessing visibility and latent themes for all nine Eurofound forms.

Objective

The aim of this study is twofold: (i) to identify which employment forms receive greater public attention on X, and (ii) to uncover the latent themes structuring user discourse on these forms.

Methods

A corpus of 14,442 publicly available English-language X posts was compiled and preprocessed using standard text cleaning, stopword removal, and n-gram construction. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models with varying topic numbers were estimated, and coherence/perplexity diagnostics guided model selection. Descriptive analytics and intertopic distance visualisations supported interpretation of the model outputs.

Results

Exploratory analysis shows higher visibility of ICT-based mobile work (18.7%), interim management (17.6%), and job sharing (approximately 12%) in query distributions. LDA identified ten coherent themes, led by interim management and leadership (17.7%), digital work platforms (14.0%), and teleworking (13.8%). Diagnostic metrics and intertopic maps (t-SNE) indicate internal consistency and thematic distinctiveness. Intertopic maps reveal hybrid perceptions, especially between flexible work and job sharing. Public debate often highlights social protection, job security, and regulatory gaps.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that, alongside continuing concerns about worker protection, attention on X is dominated by technologically mediated flexibility and interim leadership. Mapping all nine forms within a single social media corpus provides a comparative lens to inform labour-market governance and organisational practice.