Abstract
Anonymous online freedom walls have become a primary outlet for Filipino university students to voice concerns that fall outside formal institutional channels. Yet, this rich body of student expression typically goes unanalyzed. This study examined 3,357 posts from a university in Manila Freedom Wall, collected from November 2025 to May 2026, to characterize the sentiment and thematic landscape of student discourse, examine its temporal dynamics across the academic calendar, and translate the findings into actionable institutional implications. Using a quantitative descriptive design with a thematic-analytic overlay, the 984 raw category labels in the dataset were consolidated into a fifteen-theme taxonomy through keyword-based grouping, after which frequency analyses and cross-tabulations of theme by sentiment and month by sentiment were computed. Results showed that the platform is overwhelmingly negative in tone, with 57.2 percent of posts expressing negative sentiment, 25.5 percent neutral, and 17.3 percent positive, a 3.3-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio. Four themes accounted for 52.5 percent of all discourse: Academic Concerns (18.4%), Interpersonal Conflict and Call-outs (13.6%), Mental Health and Personal Venting (10.3%), and Administration and Governance (10.2%). Sentiment loading varied sharply by theme: institutional touchpoints carried the highest negativity, with Academic Integrity at 100 percent, Interpersonal Conflict at 93.0 percent, Administration at 88.0 percent, Student Council at 80.0 percent, Faculty at 79.8 percent, and Facilities at 73.3 percent, while Romance, Crush, and Appreciation themes carried the bulk of positive sentiment. Posting volume was highly uneven and tracked the academic calendar, peaking at 1,416 posts in March 202642.2 percent of the entire corpus), driven by sportsfest, pre-election, and end-of-term convergence, with negativity remaining elevated into April at 63.0 percent. The study concludes that the Freedom Wall functions as a low-cost, naturally occurring barometer of student sentiment and identifies the March–April window, the consistent negativity around institutional touchpoints, and the underused appreciation channel as concrete entry points for student affairs, academic leadership, and the student council to act on.
Keywords: Sentiment analysis, thematic analysis, freedom wall, code-switched discourse, Taglish, student feedback, descriptive research