The

ser Opinion Classification and Analysis On Social Media and Its Impact On National Unity in Nigeria (A Case Study of Facebook Users)

Abstract

*Corresponding author: babazobi@hotmail.com
Unity is the key for national security which is in turn the key for national development. Unity is the major single entity that Governmental is trying to avail since the independence of Nigeria in 1960. Even though there are many measures that the government introduced to promote unity among the diversified population of Nigeria, the lingering unity still faces challenges in many aspect ranging from religion to sectionalism. The recent emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter has made it easier for the citizens to express their ideas and opinions on national matters. The user’s opinions became a field of interest to researchers. As a result, researchers have classified users’ opinions as either Positive, Negative or Neutral. Each Class of opinion has impact on the post where the opinion was expressed. The major challenge for analysing user opinions on social networking sites is the volume of the data. There are currently 30 million Facebook users in Nigeria with more than 30 million posts per day. The easiest way to collect these huge data is to automate the process. This research automatically captures and classifies the opinions of Facebook users in Nigeria on selected post that on national issues, and to study the impact of their opinions towards national unity. Data were automatically collected from Facebook using Facebook Graph API Application. Naïve Bayes classifier was used to classify the user opinions. The result showed that, social media is creating wide gap among the social media users in Nigeria, and if care is no taken, it will act as threat to national unity. When the result was analysed it was discovered that most of the negative comments are from same region which shows that, opinions of Nigerians are gradually being divided.. Recommendations was given at the end of the analysis on how social media would be used to improve national unity