Exploring Links between Online Activism and Real-World Events: A Case Study of the #FeesMustFall

Abstract

The declaration of free education for the poor and working class by the South African government remains a key result of the two-year #FeesMustFall movement. The campaign was tainted by a few heinous incidents that sought to disrupt its objectives. This study examines the connections between online activism and real-world occurrences by undertaking a longitudinal sentiment analysis of textual conversations on the Twitter platform since no quantitative research has been documented in this regard, particularly on the opinions of social media users and their associated impacts. Between October 15, 2015, and April 10, 2017, 576,583 tweets with the hashtag campaign #FeesMustFall were collected and analyzed using the Valence Aware Dictionary Sentiment Reasoner (VADER). The change point analysis (CPA) method was used to detect various changes in the dataset, and the cumulative sum analysis (CUSUM) method was used to discover changes over time. Results revealed that this online activism sentiment reacted to and reflected real-life events. The sentiment expressed is triangulated with a perceived real-life negative event, which is the burning of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) hall and the library at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), thus confirming how Internet activism influenced these real-world events during the #FeesMustFall campaign. The study makes a significant contribution because it is the first longitudinal examination of the #FeesMustFall campaign’s sentiment distribution and variations.