Episode 07 of IMANI’s PULSE Report

In the run up to the 2024 General Elections, IMANI presents PULSE, a fortnightly curated social media-based sentiment analysis report designed to follow the “pulse” of Ghanaians.

The IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis (PULSE) is to determine the sentiment on social media regarding the major political contenders for the election, as well as influential trends and influencers that are shaping social media discourse. The analyses are referenced from the following platforms:

1. Facebook
2. X (formerly, Twitter)
3. YouTube
4. Web
5. TikTok
6. Podcasts
7. Newsfeeds

PULSE monitors primarily the two main contenders, the NPP and the NDC. For this fourth episode of the series, we are adding the sentiments and influence of the other parties, the PNC, CPP, ACP and PPP, as well as independent candidates like the Butterfly Movement, the New Force and other emerging forces on the landscape.

Information is gathered via main keywords. As news themes change, analysis will be done on these keyword associations.

For the first two weeks of May 2024, the major keywords used were the following for both major contenders.

For the other contenders, since the flagbearers are not known, keywords used were as follows:

In this iteration, several other hashtags have emerged with candidate Bawumia’s campaign on social media, including the following:

1. #itispossible
2. #Boldsolutionsforthefuture
3. #Bawumia2024

For Candidate Mahama, some of the hashtags that emerged with his campaign are:

1. #24houreconomy
2. #
3. #together4change2024

Quite a few events drew a lot of attention from commenters on social media. A few of these are as follows:

1. President Nana Addo’s declaration that John Mahama will destroy his legacy as president.
2. Candidate Bawumia’s campaign tours across all the regions of Ghana
3. The issue of nurses’ allowance in one of Bawumia’s town hall meetings in the Bono East Region.
4. John Mahama’s public address on using Artificial Intelligence to combat illegal mining also sparked a lot of public debate.

The sentiments are of three values, i.e. positive, negative and neutral. All these are also collated and analyzed to determine the language, tone of comments and tweets, and tone of commentary and posts related to both candidates.

RESULTS:
The period under observation for this edition of the report is from the 21^st of April to the 17^th of May 2024

POSITIVE SENTIMENT:
The positive sentiments of NDC rose by about 3 percentage points during the period to 14.56% from a previous level of 11.38%. This means that sentiments have improved from the last period. The NPP’s positive sentiments, however, fell marginally from 15.76% to 15.17%. While the NPP still leads in positive sentiment on social media, this lead has been closed up considerably by the NDC over the period under review.

The image below shows the levels of positive sentiment for the NDC and the NPP:

Source: IMANI PULSE
NEGATIVE SENTIMENT:
Purely negative sentiment over the period did not change significantly for both party candidates. Variations did not go beyond 1% either way. People who spoke of NPP negatively fell marginally to 12.5% from 12.16%. NDC’s negative sentiments increase from around 15% to 16.36%.

Events

1. The highest number of spikes of negative sentiment against John Mahama and the NDC came from the public address by President Nana Akufo-Addo attacking Candidate John Mahama over the preservation of his legacy. This peaked between the 8^th and the 9^th of May when the debates were highest and there was a spike in mentions of both, however with Candidate Bawumia having more positives and less negatives than Candidate Mahama.

2. Candidate Bawumia had more negative mentions when it came to the issue of the nurses allowance and the inability of the government to pay the nurses.

3. Other issues that affected Candidate Bawumia were the issue of the taxation of churches and how he joked that government should rather pay churches.

4. Candidate Mahama also gained some comments and mentions with relation to his address on how AI will boost mining. These created talking points on media.

General debates are heating up on more policy issues as the campaign season is at its dawn. With Candidate Bawumia touring the country, one of the most viral hashtags has been the #BawumiaTours hashtag which showcases his addresses, and have also boosted positive sentiments as the tour of the north has generated positive publicity for the candidate for the incumbent.

MENTIONS AND REACH
NPP still leads in mentions on social media. Unlike in the last period, the NPP has opened a big gap in mentions over the last period. The period under review had NPP having around 58% of total mentions, while the NDC had 41% of mentions.

What is intriguing is that the NDC has managed to get a higher social media reach for its posts while still having lesser mentions and less positive sentiment, which means that there is more engagement organically by social media handles that speak positively about the NDC. There NDC had a reach of 2 million more than the NPP despite having 16% less mentions under review.

The extent of these reaches also tell a story around the leading hashtags and the opinions and attitudes of social media observers.

The NDC in May has been using the hashtag #Together4Change2024 as one of their major hashtags, and it has created a big amount of engagement for them.

This keyword has 43% positive sentiment and 49% negative sentiments per the AI tools being used to analyze this hashtag on social media, showing the attitudes that most commentary on social media has towards NDC’s messaging.

A new introduction to this month’s sentiment analysis is an analysis of emotions to certain hashtags to determine the social media barometer around peoples feelings towards comments and posts of various parties. For the NDC, these are as follows with regards to all the keywords under analysis:

This above shows that about 49% of all the posts had the feeling or emotion of Joy around mentions and comments, as against about a 20% having feelings of anger.

For the NPP, the hashtag #ItisPossible has had the biggest amount of engagement for the latter part of April and the first weeks of May. This keyword resonates very positively on social media with a resounding 72% positive sentiment and a 26% negative sentiment, performing very well among commenters and observers on social media.

In terms of emotional responses towards the full set of keywords for candidate Bawumia, the chart below expresses the set of emotions categorized and analyzed by the AI tools:

The NPP has therefore a lot more positive feelings per social media posts and comments than the NDC has while expressions of sadness are fewer even for more mentions and social media reach.

These will be tools for further analysis to determine what influences exist on social media to trigger the emotions.

HEAD-TO-HEAD
The head to head comparisons for this period under review looks at the usual parameters for comparison on a head to head basis to analyze the mentions. The increasing engagements on social media also allow for more reactions to be analyzed as the models are trained better and further to be sensitive to social media posts and comments.

The analysis below reflects NPP’s continued dominance of headspace on social media, interactions and discussions.

NDC has a higher social media reach than the NPP even with lesser mentions sampled. The NPP enjoys the privilege of the party in power and on the increased activity of candidate Bawumia on his tours across sections of Ghana will dominate the landscape. Since NPP has always had the momentum naturally in mentions on social media, the above head to head figures reflect that trend.

However, looking at the ratio of mentions to reach and the Average Revenue Equivalent, it shows that the NDC although puts out lesser content gets more value for its mentions in terms of audience and spread of its content. This shows an advantage of traction.

ASSOCIATED KEYWORDS AND HASHTAGS
Associated Keywords related to the campaigns as a worldcloud have also been gathered. For the purposes of education, this is a set of curated words that are closely associated with and added to posts and comments about the candidates.

For Candidate Mahama, the following are the major keywords:

For context, the Hashtag #24houreconomy still dominates Candidate Mahama’s social media commentary. It seems to be generating a lot of buzz for the Mahama campaign and leading most of the posts from pro-Mahama social accounts. Hashtags and keywords in color red above denote mentions with heavily negative sentiments.

For Candidate Bawumia, the following are the major keywords:

The two major keywords dominating the campaign are #BoldSolutionsForOurFuture and #GhanasNextChapter while the hashtag #Bawumia2024 has huge positive sentiments attached to it.

GUIDE TO SENTIMENT ANALYSIS:
Mentions: Number of times the name has been mentioned within the time period

Social Media Mentions: Number of times the name has been mentioned on social media platforms

Non-Social Mentions: Number of times the name has been mentioned on other websites

Estimated Social Media Reach: Estimated number of people that have seen the mentions on social media

Non-Social Reach: Estimated number of impressions that have seen the mentions on non-social media sites and websites (eg News Websites, etc)

Social Media Interactions: Total number of interactions generated with comments and threads in social media

User Generated Content: Total number of interactions generated from mentions on social media and other forums, blogs etc

Social Media Likes: Number of Likes of social media mentions found

Videos Incl Tik Tok: Number of videos with mentions of the keywords on Tik Tok

Positive Mentions: Number of threads/mentions with potentially positive sentiment

Negative Mentions: Number of threads/mentions with potentially negative sentiment

AVE: Advertising Value Equivalent: An estimated value of what the total cost will be if all the mentions were paid for.

Hashtags: a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#), used on social media sites and applications, especially Twitter, to identify digital content on a specific topic.

SPECIAL MENTIONS AND SEGMENTATION:
Other Contenders:
Here the Social Media Reach of other contenders are examined. Mentions for most of the actors in this space still remain negligible compared to the top two.

Nana Kwame Bediako, aka Cheddar is still very dominant in the discussions about the independents. He still commands engagement and a growing following. However, in the last month under review, the number of positive mentions have decreased to around 39% sentiments.

His most dominant #thenewforce hashtag is still increasing to an15 million post reach, which is quite significant. One of the major segments where the New Force audience is growing is on TikTok.

There has been very little activity otherwise from the other contenders since last month’s announcement of a coalition formed under the umbrella name Movement For Change led by Alan Kyeremateng.

The list of other contenders are:

• Alan Kyerematen – Butterfly Movement
• Nana Kwame Bediako – New Force Movement
• People’s National Convention (PNC)
• Convention People’s Party (CPP)
• Hassan Ayariga – All People’s Congress
• Progressive People’s Party (PPP)