Digital Media Literacy as a Driver of e-Governance Services in the Third World Countries: Some Empirical Evidence from Ghana

Abstract

A great volume of discourse on the Domestic Exchange Program (DDEP) emerged on X (formerly Twitter) when Ghana announced the measures to secure $ 3 billion bailouts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to resolve the post-COVID-19 economic crisis. Keywords and a search query were used to crawl tweets (n=5788) on the DDEP between February 1, to 28, 2023. X users’ sentiments and emotions, positive, neutral, or negative were analyzed using NRCLex, and Tone Analyzer by IBM. The emotional portrayal and categories such as sadness, fear, anger, disgust, trust, and happiness were also analyzed. The findings suggest that the dominant categories of sentiments expressed were mostly negative rather than positive. The findings further suggested that the sentiments and emotions expressed by the tweets were against the inclusion of pensioners' bonds, and pension funds in the DDEP. Also, the results from the emotional portrayal were disgust, sadness, surprise, anger, and fear on the introduction of the DDEP. The study concluded that the overall portrayal of the emotions on the DDEP was that of total public rejection. Keywords: X(Twitter); discourse; domestic debt; exchange; program; sentiment analysis; emotions DOI : 10.7176/NMMC/106-06 Data of Publication : May 30 th 2024