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 last two weeks of June 2024 and first two weeks of July 2024, here are the major keywords used.

Candidate Bawumia	Candidate Mahama
Bawumia	Mahama
#Bawumia	#Mahama
NPP	NDC
#NPP	#NDC

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

CPP	PNC	ACP	PPP	Butterfly Movement	The New Force
#CPP	#PNC	Ayariga	#PPP	Alan Kyeremateng	Nana Kwame Bediako

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

1. #itispossible
2. #ThePerfectPair
3. #NAPO 
4. #BoldSolutionsforGhana

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

1. #Mahama24houreconomy
2. #LetsBuildGhanaTogether
3. #MahamaConversations

Over the period, the major events that triggered the sentiments:

1. Introduction and unveiling of the running mate for Candidate Bawumia

For the NDC and Candidate John Mahama, the following events came up:

1. Candidate Mahama’s media and press encounter.

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.

SUMMARY OF REPORT:

Positive Sentiments:

Positive sentiments are identified by the tone of the words that are said in a facebook post or comment. Positive sentiments convey a feeling of positivity or approval of the context. In this case, positive sentiments show that people posting feel that the subject matter they post about is good and worthy of promotion, praise or approval.

This is critical for observers because it tends to show how people collectively feel about a particular person or issue.

In this case, positive sentiment looks at what people are saying or how they feel about either the NPP or the NDC.

Over the period, collectively on all monitored social platforms, 78,902 social media posts by individuals were collected and analyzed. These posts were filtered according to the sentiments they showed, with identified sentiments being marked either as positive, negative or neutral.

NDC:

The NDC’s main event during the period was the press meeting titled #MahamaConversations. Generally, the NDC’s positive sentiments saw an upward tick from 23.11% of posts monitored to 27.2% of posts monitored having the NDC keywords. To further check the reasons for the positive sentiments, the keyword #MahamaConversations was isolated and checked, together with NDC to determine whether the event had, or was responsible for the boost in positive impact.

Positive sentiment trend from last period:

For this, we were able to isolate over 3,100 posts that directly mentioned #MahamaConversations. Of these, 38.3% of the posts and comments were positive, while 15.8% were negative and some 45% of these were neutral. This shows that for the most part, the Mahama Conversations had a positive impact with social media observers.

Below are keyword clouds that were associated with posts about the Mahama conversations:

From the above, keywords from the conversations resonated with Candidate Mahama’s thrust and focus on his 24-hour economy message.

Below are major keywords related to all posts about candidate Mahama on all the social media channels:

NPP:

The NPP had social media abuzz with the announcement of the running mate of Candidate Bawumia. The subsequent announcement, approval and outdooring of the running mate, Dr Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, aka NAPO, was an event that gathered huge numbers of mentions on many different social media platforms.

In the run up to the announcement, a lot of positive sentiment was attributed to posts about the NPP, with hashtags emerging like #PerfectPairforGhana in heavy anticipation. Positive sentiments were spiked on the 4^th and 5^th of July, dipped on the 7^th and 8^th and spiked on the 9^th of July during the unveiling of the running mate. The wordcloud below shows the major NPP related keywords associated with the unveiling on social media with mostly positive mentions.

The hashtag #PerfectPair4Ghana had a lot of engagement, and from a sample of over 700 mentions, the average positive sentiment was just over 50%, with negative sentiments just around 3%.

This was mainly responsible for the positive sentiments NPP had. However, the positive sentiment for NPP decreased from 29.68% to 24.88% over the period under review. Several events could have led up to this from the sentiment analysis and the public posts that have been assessed.

Positive Sentiment Trend from previous period:

POSITIVE SENTIMENT SUMMARY:

From late June into the first half of July, the NDC has gained a higher positive public opinion based on social media posts than the NPP. The NPP seems to have lost some of the positive narrative on social media commentary to the NDC over the period. This is one of the first times since monitoring that the NDC seems to have more positive social media mentions. 

NEGATIVE SENTIMENT:

Negative sentiment connotes people making posts on social media with a negative tone or a tone of disapproval based on the text they post on social media. This is usually a means to express dissatisfaction based on a context of events, people’s feelings or reactions based on these events.

This is also a very good way to identify what key issues have a bearing on the public, or how they view either people, events or actions and it helps to determine what could be done to remedy any perceived issues poorly received by the public.

NDC:

Commentary on social media that connote negative sentiments towards candidate Mahama were relatively flat around 10% until the 7^th of July when there were sudden upticks in the frequency of negative comments for the period. The 8^th of July had the highest spikes of 30% of all posts and commentary on social media monitored. This is significant because these spikes happened just around the time that the announcement of the running mate of the NPP was made.

However, the negative sentiment fell and rose again around the 10^th and 11^th of July due to social media commentary related to challenges thrown to the NDC candidate to debate Dr Bawumia in public.

Overall, negative sentiment against the NDC were around 23.2% of all mentions of related keywords over the period. This represents just over a 1% drop from the previous level of 24.67% for the period of June.

Negative Sentiment for the last two periods under review.

NPP:

Several events over the period triggered negative comments regarding the NPP and related public commentary.

Like in the case of the NDC, much sentiment was hovering around 15% till the 4^th of July when the name of the chosen running mate was made public. This led to a spike in negative sentiment to about 30% of all NPP related comments and keywords. This then dropped slowly on the 7^th and the 8^th with a sharp rise and spike that started on the 9^th and rose to the highest point on the 10^th of July to around 50% of NPP related commentary. After this, the level was stable along the 35% mark till the 14^th of July.

To further drill down the causes, there was a comparison of NPP related keywords featuring the word “NAPO”, the nickname of the Vice-Presidential nominee for the NPP slot. The analytics here from a sample of about 1200 posts with the keyword NAPO:

Specific sentiment analysis for those keywords are below:

This is a reflection of how social media received the unveiling of NAPO based on the sentiment analysis. Most of it was triggered based on his pronouncements regarding the track record of the current government’s achievement and its comparison to the achievements of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of independent Ghana.

Further issues that triggered negative comments were the SSNIT issue and the reactions on allegations of state capture which were also heavily commented about on social media among others.

SUMMARY:

Overall, the NPP has been at the receiving end of more negative sentiment, perhaps the biggest recorded over the period, with significant focus and scrutiny coming from events related to their ticket.

The NPP’s negative sentiment increased to 36.9% over the period from a previous level of 31.4%.

There is more robust commentary emerging and this will seem to be the trend towards December as the campaign period is all but heating up now.

MENTIONS AND REACH

NPP still leads in mentions on social media. The NDC however remains very much in the shadow of the NPP when it comes to mentions. Proportionally, there have been increases in discussions by supporters of both sides.

One of the biggest battlegrounds emerging is the use of Twitter and TikTok, as they seem to be the focal point of banter especially by social media users below 35 years of age, and the conversation on TikTok especially has more women participating than on the mainstream social media platforms of facebook and twitter with relation to politics.

NDC’s social media reach is almost at par to the NPP, and in terms of ratios of total mentions, the social media reach of the NDC is actually higher and more organic.

OTHER CONTENDERS

The other contenders have not had any measurable traction over the period.  

The list of other contenders are:

• Alan Kyerematen – Movement for Change
• 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)