The Sentiment Analysis of EndSARS Protest in Nigeria

Abstract

The extraction of public opinions from online communication platforms can serve several purposes in corporate institutions, state politics, and governance.  The analysis of these opinions may be useful for both immediate business decision making and professional planning. This analysis is becoming relevant in managing social movements and digital activism by applying computational technology. There is a need to deploy this opinion mining technology to the recent largest digital activism in Nigeria known as the #EndSARS movement. In this work, we proposed the EndSARS live analytics framework which holds a promising solution to social unrest and may serve as a panacea to curbing the menace of vandalism resulting from unresolved protest issues. Using a dataset of 12,357 tweets, we demonstrated that computational technology can be relevant to addressing online protests. The result of the analysis shows the eight basic emotions expressed during the protest and approaches the government may adopt to address future activisms.