Many of us tweeting from the African continent could probably do with a hug and a kind word; this is according to the analysis of over a million tweets conducted by Egyptian data scientist Mahmoud Abdrabo from TA Telecoms, which revealed that overall, African tweets aren’t very happy.
In a bit of a surprise for anyone who regularly reads South African Twitter, we were not found to be the gloomiest of the 50 countries analysed despite scoring 75% negative sentiment, 15% neutral and only 10% positive. Sierra Leone in West Africa wins that particular prize, with 80% of its tweets negative, 12% neutral and only 8% positive tweets.
The 5GB of data used during the research was gathered from Twitter’s streaming API using Python on English tweets posted between the 26th of February and the 18th of March 2015, and announced via a press statement.
South Africans tweet the most with 344 600 tweets recorded, a number well above the average of 17 000 tweets per African country.
Want to see the results for yourself? Here’s the official infographic presenting the findings.
[Image – CC by Flickr/kopp0041]
