2015 Elections: Study Suggests Social Media May Foretell Winners

It is so hard to predict for now how much impact the social media, internet tools may play in deciding winners of the 2015 elections, how there are suggest that Nigeria is no longer far from a situation where both will foretell the winners. 

LIKE never before in the history of electioneering in Nigeria, the social media has suddenly become a beehive of activities. It now seems to offer the permutations as to which candidate will eventually emerged as the winner of elections that will be held few weeks to come across the country.

While some political enthusiast are near jubilations that their candidate are now at the threshold of claiming their mandate even when the vote is not cast, others think that it is too early count chicks since the eggs are not yet hatch.

Google, Communication and Public Affairs Manager, Anglophone West Africa,

Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade in an interview with the National Mirror debunks the claim that the social media has the capacity to determine the winner of an election.

According to him, “it is a bit hard to take one medium as the voice of the people, particularly in this part of the country where you have different views. The election is an activity that is coming up, while the social media is just a tool used to promote it.”

Kola-Ogunlade described the social media as one of the tools that Nigerians are using to promote the coming elections stressing that “this election is one of the most talked about in the country, and the reason is because the social media has played and still playing a big role.

Refuting further the claim that the current political discourse in the social media and the heat that social media campaign has created in the polity, he said that that the internet is a platform that enables democracy, stressing that “what that means is that power and knowledge is no more in the hands of the few, everyone now has access to power and knowledge meaning that everyone can talk.”

He added, “Before now it used to be one newspaper or broadcast station talking to everyone but now everyone, even there are Nigerians that have large followers more than some stations that are now forcing their positions on national issues.”

He explained that “there is now social capital as people are building online followers, so that is the advantage of the social media as it is making people to have a voice. And I am particularly please about that because young people are now speaking out, so it is no long all about age, experience or ideas.”
The Google spokesman said further that what is happening in the social media currently about the 2015 general elections is that ideas from sections of the society are being churned out through the social media.

He said, “the thing about ideas is that ideas can come from anywhere in the social media, such as the #thebringbackourgirls campaign and such other movement that have brought about changes that affect nations. The very recent one is the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris where people are unwilling to back down on terrorism.”

He however noted that the thought or ideas of people from the social media cannot decide who wins an election because of the present number of Nigerians on the internet, and the fact that not all of the will eventually cast their vote.

He stressed that “In this part of the world the internet is just growing, as at today, there are 49 million Nigerians online, and we are about 170 million. Let us assume that 60 per cent of that is of the voting age and that figure is still bigger than the number of people that use the internet but the internet does help to form and build opinion.”

Nevertheless, he said, “The potentials of the social media is a major reason why the presidential candidates have social media campaign strategy doing a lot stuff using all sorts of social media platform like Tweeter, Google+, Google hangout and Facebook.”

He stated that that was the governorship candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, Jim Agbaja recently hand a Google hangout where he was discussing with people about his campaign promises noting that “since you don’t know what particular time people will be looking for content, it therefore becomes a multiple kind approach and it’s so good that we are seeing it at this time of our existence.”

According Kola-Ogunlade, recent studies showed that people are most receptive when they are online than when they are watching television or looking at billboard saying that “if It was strong enough to engender people to come out and protest during the fuel crisis, it could affect their decision.”

While assessing the performance of the two presidential candidates, Muhammadu Buhari and President Goodluck Jonathan in the use of the social media to drive their campaign, he said that both of them have done very well stating, “I cannot say which has done better but it can only get better.

However, social media rating analysis result recently obtained using Tweet Archivist revealed that the People’s Democratic Party,PDP, candidate,  President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, GEJ, was far ahead of his opponent of the All Progressive Congress, APC, Muhammadu Buhari.

The tweet analysis for GEJ showed that he had 67 tweets with 483,128 impressions in the period between January 19 and 26 while his opponent had 2 tweets with 494 impressions for just January 25 meaning that Buhari was absence from tweeter between January 19 to 24 and 26.

The only Tweet on Buhari which had a message reads: #Muhammadu Buhari is only an agent 4 Change to reclaim Nigeria so that our country can rise again & be a source of our hope & pride.

While tweets on GEJ were mostly those confirming the authenticity of the GEJ which members of the opposition camp had being drumming during the period in other social media.

An internet tool but not a social media platform was also used to assess the presidential declaration speech so as to find out possible issues that their party will address if or when voted into power.

Known as Wordle, it is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text provided. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

The prominent words, that feature in  the speech of  contesting candidate tells a lot about the direction of the candidate, and can tell what to expect from the candidate when voted into power.

And because the apps also make it possible for the result of the Wordle to be shared online, it therefore makes it possible for it to be used as a tool to form voter’s opinion. Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size. And so if you look at the Wordle image, it pictures some text larger than the others indicating the frequency of occurrence of the word in the text.

The declaration speech of the APC candidate, in Wordle format has been labelled Figure A while that of the PDP presidential candidate is labelled Figure B.

As seen in the Wordle of the APC candidate are in the order of the sizes are: Nigeria, PDP, Government, Employment, Corruption Economy, Growth, Injustice, Challenges and Community while some key issues based words that do not feature prominently  in the speech are: Oil, Integrity, Rights, Elections, Tracks, Development, Farming

For the PDP presidential candidate words that feature prominently in his speech are: Nigeria, Opportunities, People, Young, National, Nigerians, Expanding, Initiative, Children, Forward, Years, School, Naira, Hydro-Power and Support.

However, some key issues base words do not feature prominently in the speech such as: Peace, Daughters, Food, Hungry, Rural, Projects, Education, Constitutional and APC.

According to Kola-Ogunlade although these social media platform and internet tools have great role to play in forming the opinion as per the choice of candidate that the electorate may vote for but the fact that the numbers of Nigerians on the internet is not large enough to pull a vote for a candidate, it is obviously not likely to decide a winner.

He said that once the cost of internet access drops, there is a reliable internet access and more Nigerians that vote are aware of the potentials then we see social media and internet tools deciding the winning candidate in the country.