This project aims to investigate the nature of online discourse on Kenyan twitter regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kenyan twittersphere discourse is remarkably fluid, with moments of online solidarity as frequent as moments of extreme polarisation. This project seeks to understand whether conversations about COVID-19 have been tainted by the usual propaganda common in Kenyan twittersphere, or 'tweeps' have been level headed in their discourse.
To narrow the scope of this project, and to ensure most of the tweets were by Kenyans, I decided to use four hashtags that had been trending on Kenyan Twitter since the first news of the pandemic broke.
These are: #covid19kenya #coronavirusinKenya #covid19inkenya #covid_19ke
This is an ongoing project, and in near future, I intend to use Sentiment Analysis, Word Embedding and Topic Modeling for further analysis on this dataset.