Having led in positive comments on social media for almost four consecutive times, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has lost some positive sentiments this time around in the latest findings from the IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis known as PULSE.
Read Also: IMANI PULSE Report: NPP’s Positive Sentiments on Social Media Continues to Surge
Released every month, the PULSE report analyses 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.
For its 10 edition, the findings show that the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has made gains in positive sentiments on social media, reaching up to 27% from last months record of 23.11%.
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“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,” the report said.
The report noted that hashtags like #MahamaConversations particularly accounted for this. The NDC flagbearer earlier this month had an engagement with journalists, answering questions about the economy, corruption, and his vision for re-election.
“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,” the report said.
While the NPP still leads in positive mentions, they have experienced some decreases from the previous month, moving from 29.68% in June to 24.88% in July.
The events accounting for this are not clear, but within the same period, the NPP experienced more negative sentiments on social media. Negative sentiment increased to 36.9% over the period from a previous level of 31.4%
For instance, the report notes that before July 4, negative sentiments about the party were hovering around 15%, but after the name of its 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 7th and the 8th with a sharp rise and spike that started on the 9th and rose to the highest point on the 10th of July to around 50% of NPP-related commentary. After this, the level was stable along the 35% mark till the 14th of July.”
The opposition NDC overall had a 1% drop in negative sentiments from the previous level of 24.67% for the period of June.
