DH 150 Final Project:

2013 Kenyan Elections and Dangerous Speech

Stephanie WongChelsea WeiningerAnthony Bushong

What is Dangerous Speech?

● Impassioned sender

● Ethos based, potentially inaccurate statements

● With the intent of mobilizing violence

● Typically revolving around polarizing issues with a volatile audience

● More relevant now than ever with social media increasing immediacy of publication and breadth of audience

Why Kenya?

● 2007 Presidential Election

● Raila Odinga loses to Mwai Kibaki

● Organized rallies develop into protests

● Protests give way to riots and violence, 1300 fall to the post-election chaos

● What did social media have to do with this? With its growing popularity, will it have more of an effect in 2013?

How will Social Media affect Kenya?

● In 2007-08, mobile access was costly

● Twitter and Facebook more accessible now

● Will social media propagate violence? Will it be easier to mobilize people for riots and protests?

● Or will it foster more peaceable discussions? Will it provide an outlet to dispel such violent reactions?

● Provides a live social experiment to witness as it happens

Kenya's preemptive actions

● The Umati Project

○ First of its kind

● Kenyan government monitoring for dangerous speech

○ National Steering Committee on Media Monitoring

● Defining success: Will they be successful if they stop dangerous speech, or if they change the way social media is used?

Our Project and Hypothesis

● Monitoring tweets in different key locations during the election results and post-election results

● Searching for hashtags and text involving dangerous speech, comparing it with tweets involving peace

● How do the results of these queries correlate with the actions of the people?

● Hypothesis: Based off of the violence in 2007, we believe that there will be more tweets partaking in hate and dangerous speech than tweets regarding peace talks.

Methods

● Looked at Tweets by location● All tweets produced by users in Kenya and a

bit of surrounding areas● Looked solely at tweets with popular hashtag

#KenyaDecides● Started recording during last hour that polls

were still open at 9pm March 4th● Continued recording until day after election

results released on March 11th

Methods

● Data carried over to MySQL

● Queries included:○ searching by words like "riot" and "peace"○ users○ location

Data

Noteworthy Tweets

RESULTS so far

● In contrast to the 2007 elections, this election has been peaceful so far

● The word "peace" has been tweeted more than any other "dangerous speech"

● Avoiding a repeat of the past● Uhuru Kenyatta won the election, as

announced on Monday March 11th● Controversy from the announcement leads

to small amounts of violence

Visualization

● Polarity of most used words in tweets

● Word cloud to discover which words to test

● Gephi focus on those words

Word Cloud

What this means...

● Popular words include:○ odinga○ uhuru○ mudavadi○ spoilt/rejected○ results, votes, win○ peace○ blackout○ wazi campaign

● Strong signs of peaceful communication● Blackout = monitoring hate speech or offensive images

in media● Wazi campaign = nationwide public awareness

campaign that uses 3D animation to convey messages of peace and good governance

What we are taking away from this

● Taking part in an event of worldwide importance as it is happening

● Educating ourselves on the political system and culture in Kenya

● Social media can facilitate peace as easily as it can violence