Making sense of online sentiment after Nigeria’s Edo state elections

Key takeaways

• Looking at sentiment data aggregating thousands of artifacts of online discourse, FilterLabs detected significant discrepancies between mainstream and social media coverage of recent elections in Nigeria
• News media coverage showed a spike in positivity around the ruling APC party that was absent from Nigerian social media discourse 
• Concerns about Nigeria’s electoral system and accusations of vote stealing appeared in both information environments

Intelligence is only as good as the information it’s based on. With millions of articles and social media posts published every day, it can become impossible to see the big picture. To gain a deeper understanding of shifts in sentiment in a country or region, FilterLabs uses AI to gather and analyze millions of pieces of conversational data and translates them into comprehensible data visualizations. 

This week we’ve been looking at an off-cycle gubernatorial election in Nigeria on September 21. The BBC reported that, with its victory in Edo state, the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) party had “won its first big electoral test” since President Bola Tinubu came to power last year. Is that how Nigerians feel?

Here are two charts tracking sentiment around the APC in Nigeria over the past month, one for mainstream news sources and one for social media. Notice anything interesting? 

That’s right: sentiment around the APC rises steadily on mainstream sources leading up to and after the election, while on social media it remains relatively stable, and even drops slightly.

There was a similar contrast, though less pronounced, in sentiment around Nigerian elections more broadly. We saw a positive shift around the election in Nigerian mainstream news…

…while sentiment in FilterLabs’ Nigerian social feed—which includes a variety of discourse platforms like social media sites, online forums, and messaging channels—stayed relatively flat.

What does this mean? 

Positive sentiment doesn’t necessarily mean positive coverage, but a dramatic shift like the one in the APC coverage above suggests that a new narrative may have appeared in Nigeria’s mainstream news—whether organically or through a government information campaign (also known as propaganda). 

As the FilterLabs team examined the artifacts our data platform Talisman unearthed, it was clear that both news coverage and social media discussion had plenty to say about Nigeria’s fraught electoral system. Both mentioned accusations of vote stealing and rigged elections. With the dire state of Nigeria’s economy—as evidenced by last month’s “End Bad Governance” protests over inflation and financial hardship—the stakes are high. 

But the discrepancy in sentiment between Nigeria’s news media and social discourse online, particularly with respect to the APC, suggests the country’s news outlets may be shaping their coverage to the preferences of those in power more than to the needs of Nigeria’s people.