Online Hate Speech in Cameroon
This project was all about how social media was being used in the Cameroon during the Anglophone Crisis, and in the run-up to elections in October 2018. I worked in partnership with r0g_ - a non-profit agency for open culture and critical transformation, the United Nations and UNESCO.
OVERVIEW
The Anglophone Crisis is a rapidly growing anti-government protest featuring an aggressive ‘info-war’ of social media rhetoric. My job was to collect data from particular Facebook users, news corporation pages and public persons, and create an interactive data visualisation which explores what was happening in depth. The data was collected through the Facebook Graph API and included status post updates, comments, likes and shares made to that particular page/person.
The interfaces initiate with an overview of the data collected for 31 days. The X-axis shows the names of Facebook users, and beside them, their personal graph which shows a combination of likes, comments and shares for that particular day. Moving forward and clicking on a bar (seen in the second image), the user is taken to a page which displays all the posts made by that Facebook page. Clicking on a box displays the contents of that post and a table which shows specific hate speech terminology used.
This interface was built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I did experiment using d3.js, and did produce some outcomes for this project, however, for that I wanted to achieve, I felt using JavaScript was the way forward.
THE DATA
The image above shows how I organised the data for each of the Facebook profiles after it was scrapped using FacePager. The excel files contain all the posts made within the timeframe set: from 15 June to 15 August 2018. All the comments made by users as well as the number of likes and shares are shown too. This data was extremely useful when creating the visualisation. The total number of social interaction from that account is essential when displaying how much that profile used social media.