Analysis of X (Formerly Twitter) Users’ Perceptions towards the Election of Jolidee Matongo as Mayor of Johannesburg

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the analysis of X (formerly Twitter) users’ perceptions towards the election of Jolidee Matongo as mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2021. This election was significant because it was the first time that a person of Zimbabwean descent had been elected mayor of Johannesburg. Given the vast amount of user-generated content on Twitter, analysing tweets can serve as a valuable proxy for capturing public opinion. However, to date, there appears to be a notable research gap concerning the wide adoption of tweet analysis for understanding public opinion. The study used 4324 tweets that were collected from X (Twitter) via the Twitter application programming interface (API) over a period of one week after the election. Sentiment analysis and topic modelling were used to analyse the results. The results suggested that social media platforms can be used to gain valuable insights into public opinion and the different perspectives. Social media platforms can also be used to spread xenophobia. Cognitive biases, specifically the confirmation bias has been found to influence Twitter users’ perception towards the election of Matongo. A significant number of negative tweets expressed xenophobic views due to Matongo’s Zimbabwean roots. However, the average sentiment score of 0.10 suggested that the overall sentiment of the tweets was slightly positive.