Since the end of 2019, the world faced a major health crisis in the form of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. To mitigate the impact of the pandemic, governments across the globe instituted measures such as restricting local and international travel and in many cases, ordering citizens to stay indoors. Considering the social and economic impact of these restrictions it becomes crucial to investigate internet citizens’ (netizens) perception about the precautionary measures adopted. The study is anchored in the digital public sphere theory, which treats social media applications as virtual platforms where netizens commune to share ideas and debate about issues that affect them. Social media platforms already have critical public views on the current pandemic. However, the majority of this data is unstructured and difficult to interpret. Natural language processing (NLP), on the other hand, makes the task of gathering and analysing vast amounts of textual data feasible. Extracting structured knowledge from natural language, however, comes with unique challenges due to diverse linguistic properties including abbreviation, spelling mistakes, punctuations, stop words and non-standard text. In this work, The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was applied to tweeter data to extract topics discussed by netzens from Zimbabwe and South Africa. The primary focus of this paper, is to comparatively explore the variety of topics that occupied twitter communities from the two countries. We examine whether or not the national identities that define and differentiate citizens of these countries also exist on Twitter as evident in the emerging topics. Furthermore, this work investigated public opinion by analysing how citizens discuss the issues around the COVID-19 pandemic on social media
Social media have been hailed as liberative in contexts of political repression. In Zimbabwe, there are emergent debates on the possibilities of using Facebook to ‘democratise’ political space. But the use of Facebook to settle personal political scores or to relentlessly attack political opposition seemed to have escaped academic scrutiny. This study looks at the use of Facebook by opposing camps in Zimbabwe’s July 2013 election to attack each other, as well as the challenges posed by this scenario. It looks at Baba Jukwa and Amai Jukwa’s pages on Facebook. The study is grounded in the concepts of freedom of expression, the public sphere and democracy. Semiotic analysis and critical discourse analysis were used to analyse the posts by Baba Jukwa and Amai Jukwa. The study sought to explore how the Internet’s liberative potential enhanced by free entry and exit and the ability to remain anonymous impacts on Baba Jukwa and Amai Jukwa’s discourses on Facebook. It revealed that the two pages make use of personal attacks on ‘targets’, and the resultant polarisation is often mirrored in the mainstream media. The study concludes that even though Facebook provides an alternative public sphere, it can also be ‘pulverised’ by irrational debates.
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