This document summarizes a student project analyzing social media data from Kenya's 2013 elections to study the impact of "dangerous speech" and determine if social media would propagate violence as it did in 2007. The project monitored tweets around election time with hashtags like #KenyaDecides, searching for terms like "riot" and "peace" by location. Preliminary results found most tweets promoted peace, avoiding repeats of 2007 violence, though some unrest occurred after results. Word clouds and networks showed popular words discussed the election without inciting hatred. The project concluded social media can facilitate peace and non-violent political discourse.

1. DH 150 Final Project:
2013 Kenyan Elections and
Dangerous Speech
Stephanie Wong
Chelsea Weininger
Anthony Bushong

2. What is Dangerous Speech?
● Impassioned sender
● Ethos based, potentially inaccurate statements
● With the intent of mobilizing violence
● Typically revolving around polarizing issues with a
volatile audience
● More relevant now than ever with social media
increasing immediacy of publication and breadth of
audience

3. Why Kenya?
● 2007 Presidential Election
● Raila Odinga loses to Mwai Kibaki
● Organized rallies develop into protests
● Protests give way to riots and violence, 1300 fall to
the post-election chaos
● What did social media have to do with this? With its
growing popularity, will it have more of an effect in
2013?

4. How will Social Media affect Kenya?
● In 2007-08, mobile access was costly
● Twitter and Facebook more accessible now
● Will social media propagate violence? Will it be
easier to mobilize people for riots and protests?
● Or will it foster more peaceable discussions? Will it
provide an outlet to dispel such violent reactions?
● Provides a live social experiment to witness as it
happens

5. Kenya's preemptive actions
● The Umati Project
○ First of its kind
● Kenyan government monitoring for dangerous
speech
○ National Steering Committee on Media
Monitoring
● Defining success: Will they be successful if they stop
dangerous speech, or if they change the way social
media is used?

6. Our Project and Hypothesis
● Monitoring tweets in different key locations during
the election results and post-election results
● Searching for hashtags and text involving dangerous
speech, comparing it with tweets involving peace
● How do the results of these queries correlate with
the actions of the people?
● Hypothesis: Based off of the violence in 2007, we
believe that there will be more tweets partaking in
hate and dangerous speech than tweets regarding
peace talks.

7. Methods
● Looked at Tweets by location
● All tweets produced by users in Kenya and a
bit of surrounding areas
● Looked solely at tweets with popular hashtag
#KenyaDecides
● Started recording during last hour that polls
were still open at 9pm March 4th
● Continued recording until day after election
results released on March 11th

8. Methods
● Data carried over to MySQL
● Queries included:
○ searching by words like "riot" and "peace"
○ users
○ location

10. Data

13. Noteworthy Tweets

16. RESULTS so far
● In contrast to the
2007 elections, this
election has been peaceful so far
● The word "peace" has been tweeted more
than any other "dangerous speech"
● Avoiding a repeat of the past
● Uhuru Kenyatta won the election, as
announced on Monday March 11th
● Controversy from the announcement leads
to small amounts of violence

17. Visualization
● Polarity of most
used words in
tweets
● Word cloud to
discover which
words to test
● Gephi focus on
those words

18. Word Cloud

19. What this means...
● Popular words include:
○ odinga
○ uhuru
○ mudavadi
○ spoilt/rejected
○ results, votes, win
○ peace
○ blackout
○ wazi campaign
● Strong signs of peaceful communication
● Blackout = monitoring hate speech or offensive images
in media
● Wazi campaign = nationwide public awareness
campaign that uses 3D animation to convey messages
of peace and good governance

21. What we are
taking away
from this
● Taking part in an event of worldwide
importance as it is happening
● Educating ourselves on the political system
and culture in Kenya
● Social media can facilitate peace as easily
as it can violence