#LagosEastDebates Twitter Analysis
Tweet Analysis of the #LagosEastDebates which held on Sunday 29th of November 2020.
The debate was organized by The Electoral College Nigeria — “A Non-Partisan and Non-Governmental Organization with a passion for better Governance in Nigeria and Africa”.
The virtual debate held on Sunday, 29th of November 2020 at 3 pm and was hosted by Joyce Daniels.
Here is the list of candidates that were to participate in the debate:
* Tokunbo Abiru (APC)
* Adebowale J. Johnson (ADP)
* Babatunde Olalere Gbadamosi (PDP)
* Adeoye Mercy Boside (AAC)
* Lawal Adijat Opeyemi (NNPP)
* Olukunle Akin Adisa (NRM)
* Muyiwa Sunday Adebanjo (AA)
* Aluko Saheed Olawale (SDP)
* John Kome (ADC)
* Temitope Taiwo Elijah (YPP)
These names and respective parties were supposed to be important in our analysis but turned out otherwise due to reasons we will find out in this report.
A total of 5,207 tweets were collected from the 29th of November to the 30th of November 2020.
Poor Turnount
The candidates weren’t punctual to the event. The twitter audience were already expressing their disappointment at the failure of the candidates to show up on time.
There were already calls for the masses to ignore the debate as the candidates weren’t present at the scheduled time.
Only two candidates showed up for the debate — The AAC candidate - Abosede Mary and Babatunde Olalere Gbadamosi(PDP).
TWITTER DATA ANALYSIS
Tweet By Time:
From the graph above, we can notice the following:
- The hashtag began around 12 pm — specifically, the first tweet appeared at 12:26 pm by Chidinmaekile offering incentives for people to use the hashtag in their tweets.
- We can see spikes that form an obvious pattern indicating that there were many replies compared to retweets and original tweets.
This poses a question- How many replies were real?
The answer presents itself in the image above. Most of the replies weren’t connected to the hashtag and this was work of amplifiers trying to get the hashtag trend using dodgy methods.
Tweet Type
We can see that replies alone constituted 63% of the total tweets we collected.
Let’s have a look at the users with the highest number of replies
The following users Chidinmaekile, B_RedHKN, DONJAAZY, RUDEB0YPsquare and iam_mompha had the highest number of replies.
The common thing about these users is they belong to celebrities — you might have that thought at the first instance but in reality, these accounts are either parodies, fan accounts, or hacked celebrity accounts that are being used to promote hashtags.
Virality and Mentions
SavvyRinu had the highest number of retweets on the hashtag campaign.
Rinu’s new influence stems from her role in the #EndSARS protests. We have seen an increase in her influence among youths, demanding good governance and accountability.
Party Mention
The All Progressives Congress (APC) had a lot more mentions on the hashtag compared to the Opposition party PDP.
Participants
The accounts with huge influence in this network have a high number of followers and are actually verified accounts.
From the network graph, we can identify 5 major communities trending the hashtag #LagosDesbates2020.
Sentiment
We can see that the Negative sentiments were much greater.
Here are some insights into why this must have been:
- The high level of distrust in the government following the handling of the #EndSARS protests
- The fact that the candidates showed up very late for the debate
- About 80% of the participants refused to show up for the debate.
Conclusion
The debate witnessed a lot of hiccups from shady promotions, to the inability of the candidates to show up for the event. The citizens missed a chance of hearing from potential lawmakers on how to provide better governance and bridge the trust gap between the government and citizens.
