Aspire Data Solutions: Digital Reactions Towards Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's Facebook Activities

Mihiretu Kebede(PhD)

Disclaimer

This blog post is simply about visualizing the data. I have no political affiliation.

Introduction

Haccalu Hundessa, the popular Ethiopian singer, was killed in June 29, 2020. His death sparked a widespread violence in Oromia region. Several innocent civilians were murdered and public and private properties worth of millions were vandalized. The government has immediately taken measures to restore law and order. I am sincerely hoping prime minister Abiy’s government will take significant steps in letting an independent and international investigation. As a concerned Ethiopian, I have tried to follow some of the news. To this date, the news is giving me nightmares!

In this short blog posts, I will dive into prime minister Abiy’s Facebook activity and his followers reactions using emojis. I will then compare positive (like, care, love, wow) and negative reactions(angry, sad, haha) towards his posts on Facebook. More specificically, I will show you the trend of love, anger and sad reactions.

NB: classifying the reactions into positve/negative may not reflect the actual reaction of the individual to the news. It doesn’t also reflect the contents of the prime minister’s Facebbook post. In addition, internet was locked from the first of july until 23rd of July. That is clearly visible from the plots with a simple horizontal line.

Data

I have manually collected Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s one month Facebook posts (From June 24 until August 09). I collected few variables: date Abiy Ahmed posted on Facebook, type of Facebook reaction (eg: Like, Love, angry, sad, etc…) and total number of reactions.

Initialize

Required packages

library(readxl) 
library(ggplot2) 
library(jpeg) 
library(directlabels) 
library(dplyr)
library(data.table) 
library(scales)
library(readxl)
library(jpeg)
library(ggimage)

abiy_ahmed <- read_xlsx("F:/github/githubwebsite/_posts/2020-08-04-2020-08-04-abiyahmed/abiy_ahmed.xlsx")
# As usual 
dim(abiy_ahmed)

[1] 154   4

glimpse(abiy_ahmed)

Rows: 154
Columns: 4
$ Date_posted   <dttm> 2020-06-24, 2020-06-24, 2020-06-24, 2020-06-2~
$ Reaction      <chr> "Like", "Love", "Care", "Angry", "Haha", "Wow"~
$ Count         <dbl> 21000, 876, 272, 50, 64, 22, 3, 92000, 5500, 1~
$ Death_Haccalu <chr> "Before", "Before", "Before", "Before", "Befor~

#abiy_ahmed <- abiy_ahmed %>% 
#  rename(Date_postedX.U.FEFF.Date_posted)

Some descriptives

In total, about a million (932453 ) people showed some kind of reaction. On average, more than 35206(sd=20293) peple liked his posts, an average of 840 people hit the angry buttons.

# Mean per reaction
library(dplyr)
abiy_ahmed %>%  
  summarize(sum=sum(Count)) # 932453

# A tibble: 1 x 1
     sum
   <dbl>
1 932453

mean <- abiy_ahmed %>% 
  group_by(Reaction) %>% 
  summarize(mean=mean(Count, na.rm=T)) %>% 
  mutate(mean=round(mean,2)) %>% 
  ungroup()

sd <- abiy_ahmed %>% 
  group_by(Reaction) %>% 
  summarize(sd=sd(Count, na.rm=T)) %>%
  mutate(sd=round(sd,2)) %>% 
  ungroup()

merge(mean, sd)

  Reaction     mean       sd
1    Angry   840.10   656.16
2     Care   670.50   441.66
3     Haha   296.55   141.33
4     Like 35206.52 20293.70
5     Love  3014.17  2179.53
6      Sad   633.43  2066.60
7      Wow    90.09    94.38

Visualize

plot <- ggplot(abiy_ahmed, aes(x=Date_posted,
                               y=Count, col=Reaction)) +
  geom_point(size=2) +
  geom_line(size=1) 

plot1 <- direct.label(plot, "first.qp", )

plot1

plot <- ggplot(abiy_ahmed, aes(x=Date_posted,
                             y=Count, col=Reaction)) +
  geom_point(size=2) + geom_line(size=1.5) + theme_void() + 
  xlab("Date of Facebook post") + 
  ylab("Number of reactions") 

plot1 <- direct.label(plot, "first.qp")

plot2 <- ggbackground(plot1, "abiy.png") 
plot2

Digital Reactions Towards Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Facebook Activities