In preparation for the next general election in Nigeria, tech giant Google has launched a new webpage dubbed the Nigeria Elections Trends Hub.
You can check out the page on Google Trends to see how the candidates and hot topics stack up against one another in terms of search volume.
The webpage includes charts and maps showing the popularity of various candidates’ names over the course of a month.
As part of a larger effort to help with the 2023 elections, Google has announced the Election Hub as well as training for news and media publishers on how to use YouTube to tell election stories and training for journalists on how to use search and other Google tools for better storytelling, such as data visualization, verification, and fact-checking.
Google’s Communications and Public Affairs Manager for West Africa, Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, commented on the effort as follows:
Our goal to catalog and make the world’s knowledge broadly accessible and helpful is more important than ever as Nigeria prepares to vote in elections marking 24 years of democracy.
We’re organizing data to make it simple for voters in Nigeria to learn more about the candidates via the lens of Google Trends because we want to ensure that they have the knowledge they need to make educated decisions in the forthcoming elections.
To use one of my favorite quotes ever: “Better access to and use of political information benefits the democratic process and encourages more public engagement.”
Voters in Nigeria will benefit from the Nigeria Elections Trends Hub by being able to make more well-informed choices at the elections.
By giving people more agency, we hope they will get more involved in the political process and help shape it in a more democratic manner.
