After a few days of threatening to expose a number of alleged corrupt judges, Anas Aremeyaw Anas, Ghana’s most popular investigative journalist screened the three hour investigative documentary on a large screen at the Accra International Conference center. Using youtube to build interest proved to be a good strategy as this teaser got him more than 100k views , beating many music videos released by local artists.
Hundreds of people thronged the conference center to watch and comment on the infamous video. But this was not without drama as one of the implicated justices attempted unsuccessfully to stop the screening. The issue was discussed heavily on radio, tv and social media by anyone with access to these channels. Below is an analysis of how social media reacted to the content of the video.
The major hashtags that trended
The three main hashtags used by social media users in Ghana were #StopJudicialCorruption #AnasIsComing and #WatchingTheAnasMovie. Though #StopJudicialCorruption was the official hashtag used by Anas’ team in its Facebook post on Sept 10th, #AnasIcComing became more popular than #StopJudicialCorruption.
#AnasIsComing was inspired by a line in Sarkodie’s Pizza and Burger track†in a line in which he warns corrupt officals to desist from bribery and corruption. #AnasIsComing was first used by @Baeless_me on twitter some 12 hours after, on the same day #StopJudicialCorruption was unveiled by †the Tiger Eye Pi team.
Jokes on y’all who didn’t pay attention to @Sarkodie when he said “Anas is coming” #Anasiscoming
ó Brown Shugar! (@baeless_me) September 10, 2015
#WatchingTheAnasMovie was the least popular of all the three major hashtags used on Ghana social media. This hashtag was used primarily by Starr fm’s @KafuiDey who got dozens of retweets because of his popularity.
Justice Ivy Heward Mills receives 500 Cedis with smiles and warns Anas not to spill the beans #WatchingTheAnasMovie ó Kafui Dey (@KafuiDey) September 22, 2015
Twitter beat Facebook and blogs
From the analysis, twitter seems to be the channel most preferred by Ghanaians to discuss social issues and subjects of national interests. There were more than 4,000 hits recorded on twitter whiles Facebook (though is the most popular social media channel) recorded a mere 68 with blogs trailing with 2 hits. Most of the posts came in on the 22nd and 23rd Sept.
The rot went international
Besides Ghana, it turned out the United Kingdom and United States were the two other countries which showed interest in the expose. It is though not clear whether these are Ghanaians living abroad, foreigners or both.
Back home, other foreign dignitaries expressed their views on the expo. Notable among them is the Dutch Ambassador to Ghana @HansDocter who has published a few tweets on this matter.
Depressed by @anasglobal film on judicial corruption. So many involved. All that time spent on seedy deals. No one cares about justice.
ó NL Ambassador Ghana (@hansdocter) September 22, 2015
@BBCAfrica turned out to be the International media which tweeted the most about this issue.
Allegations of judicial bribery lead to new words in Ghana – and other African news nuggets http://t.co/09PzzvucSM pic.twitter.com/eaGHpnu0TP ó BBC Africa (@BBCAfrica) September 27, 2015
FlexyYeboah tweeted the most
Though people from all walks of life published multiple tweets to express their views on the matter, no one beat @FlexyYeboah, a Ghanaian tweep living in the UK, who published some 72 tweets (Most of them retweets of @KafuaDey’s tweets on the #WatchingTheAnasMovie hashtag)
*Meltwater Buzz was used to do the social media analysis.
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By: Edward Tagoe/citifmonline.com/Ghana