Kenya-Tweet: Twitter Use in Kenya

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Introduction

Kenya-Tweet ceased working on the 20th of April, 2023, when Twitter shut off its access to Twitter's API as a part of that company's move to charge obscene amounts for even the most basic tweet scraping. The website remains live, displaying an archive of tweets it captured on the 28th of March, 2023, which shows a road trip someone took that day.

When this project launched in 2014, many more people had geolocation enabled on their Twitter accounts and so there was a much greater frequency and diversity to Tweets coming from Kenya. However, by 2023 most had turned this feature off and Kenya-Tweet displayed mostly Tweets from people using third-party tools. In the case of this roadtrip, the individual was using Foursquare Swarm, a companion app to one of Foursquare's others meant to share location information publicly and with friends, as well as produce a record of that info. See its Wikipedia page for More information about the app.

Only three tweets not associated with this road trip are a part of this archive, becuase they came in during this time period. One of them was also generated through Foursquare Swarm. The other two were autogenerated Tweets announcing jobs, from the Twitter account for the website UN Talent.

At the end of Kenya-Tweet's live operation, most Tweets it displayed were from a bot that Tweeted Reddit posts from the subreddit "KenyansOnReddit."

Please see below for this project's original introduction, as well as more information about how it was built.

Original Introduction

Click on the "Map" icon in the upper-right to access the real-time map of tweets located in (and very near to) Kenya. Only those tweets from individuals who have their geolocation function turned on will display. The markers update every ten minutes. The "Home" icon will always bring you back to this page while the "Refresh" icon on the map page will reload that entire page.

On the map itself, you will find at most 20 markers, each of which is associated with a tweet in Kenya (and occasionally other eastern African countries). Clicking on a marker will open a popup that will display that tweeter's handle, followed by the text of the tweet. The map can be zoomed in to see street detail.

Background

This project began as an idea in December 2013 to create a mobile mapping system that would allow people to track, in real time, the tweets coming out of the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. After quickly realizing that such a project would not be feasible, given how few tweets come from that part of Kenya, this project's geographic area quickly expanded to include the entirety of Kenya.

Tools

The largest tool working behind the scenes on this project is Mapbox's map tiles. The site itself is build with the jQuery Mobile framework. The twitter data utilizes Martin Hawksey's TAGS tool for tweet archiving by pulling from Twitter's firehose API, but with a number of modifications that turns it into an up-to-the-minute database of the 20 most recent tweets geolocated to Kenya. (TAGS is available via the Creative Commons Attribution license.) By hosting this tool on Google Drive and automatically publishing any changes as a Comma Separated Values (.csv) file, this site combines the .csv with the Mapbox map using Leaflet's Omnivore plugin.