How South Africans reacted to the Oslo Attack on Twitter

The recent terrorist attack in Oslo received massive media coverage as soon as the word broke out. As is becoming usual in this day and age, Twitter was the first source of information for what had happened.

As the days progressed, South Africans had their voices and sentiments heard on Twitter. We have analyzed these mentions to see exactly what we said. All results in this post are from South Africans talking about Oslo on Twitter.

Word Cloud

As seen above, the word cloud shows how people discussed the terrorist attack. It was linked it to a Christian bomber, as well as accusations of Isreal’s Mossad being behind the attack. In light of the recent death of Amy Winehouse, some people felt it important to mention their condolences for both tragedies in the same tweet.

Sentiment Graph

Our state of the art sentiment algorithm shows that most people felt extreme uneasiness and sadness regarding the incidents, but there was a notable lack of other negative emotions such as anger and loathing.

Overall Sentiment

The overall sentiment was highly negative, of course. The scale sits at 25%, indicating very high negativity in the mentions.

Top Emotions

We matched the emotive words used in all tweets to show a word cloud of top emotions.

Top Locations

Most tweets originated from Johannesburg. We also picked up on a few tweets from tourists within the country talking about the tragedy, notably the U.S.A.

Most Influential Hashtags

Most hashtags were related to the attacks directly. This shows the top hashtags used in tweets over the last few days after the attack.

Most Active Users

These users are the ones that tweeted most about the attack. User @whumba is at the top, which appears to be an Islam related account.

Most Mentioned Users

Gareth Cliff from 5FM was the most mentioned user in all Oslo related tweets. This was due to the reweet of his tweet, as given in the top tweets below:

Top Tweets

The top tweet, most influential and retweeted by SA, was created by 5FM’s Gareth Cliff.