CaneTheDev/Echoes-of-Influence

Social Media and Voter Perception in Nigeria # Echoes of Influence: Social Media and Voter Perception in Nigeria **Understanding How Political Influencers Shape Public Opinion During Elections** --- ## What This Research Is About During Nigeria's 2023 Presidential Election, millions of people turned to Twitter to discuss the candidates: Peter Obi, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and Atiku Abubakar. But here's the big question: **Do influential Twitter users actually change how people think about candidates, or do they just reflect what people already believe?** This research project answers that question using data science and sentiment analysis. We collected thousands of tweets from 10 major political influencers and analyzed the conversations happening in their comment sections to measure their actual impact on public opinion. --- ## The Simple Version: How It Works ### Step 1: Collecting the Conversations Imagine you want to know if a popular Twitter user influences their followers. You'd need to: 1. Find their tweets about the election 2. Read all the comments people left 3. Figure out if those comments are positive, negative, or neutral That's exactly what we did, but instead of reading manually (which would take months), we built a computer program to do it automatically. We collected: - **152 posts** from 10 influential Twitter users - **1,583 comments** from regular people responding to those posts - All from the period May 2022 to March 2023 ### Step 2: Understanding Nigerian Twitter Language Here's where it gets interesting. Standard sentiment analysis tools are built for American or British English. They don't understand Nigerian slang like: - **"Obidient"** (a term for Peter Obi supporters) - **"Sapa"** (Nigerian slang for being broke/suffering) - **"Idan"** (meaning "champion" or "boss") - **"Abeg"** (meaning "please") To help the computer understand these words, we downloaded a **Nigerian Pidgin English dictionary from NaijaLingo.com** - a comprehensive online resource for learning Nigerian Pidgi …