Social Watcher is a large-scale community service which utilizes media and ICT tools and expertise. The service utilizes Artificial Intelligence, Text Mining, Big Data analytics and visualization, and Natural Language Processing to analyze the public opinion on social media regarding political and social issues in Kuwait and study the impact of those political and social issues on the Kuwaiti society. Through this analysis, our platform monitors contents and activities on social media in Kuwait, identify and analyze public opinion trends, analyze public sentiment, and finally delivers analytics reports, infographics, and interactive dashboards showing the results of our analysis in an open, transparent, objective , and scientifically motivated manner. The analytics reports are published on our mobile friendly web platform, social media, and local media.

The analytical reports, infographics, and dashboards published on Social Watcher web platform provide effective tools for the decision makers, media professionals, political analysts, and the public through helping them in understanding public opinion trends and sentiment on social media towards political and economic issues in Kuwait, and the change in these trends within a specific timeframe.

Social Watcher also allows the user to view trending Twitter hashtags, word, and phrases in Kuwait through a user-friendly interface available on our web platform. Our trend data collection system updates its database with Twitter trends in Kuwait every hour through integrating with Twitter Official API. Historic trending hashtags, word, and phrases in Kuwait are also available through our historic archive of Twitter trends in Kuwait which is available since March 2014. The user can retrieve the historic trends through our web platform. We utilize the data stored in our archive of Kuwait Twitter trends in our analysis reports through applying data analysis, text mining, and data visualization on this archive.

https://watcher.social

• Kuwait

Through using the same analytical methods and applying and adapting the same big data analytics and visualization tools to the social media content published in other societies and countries.

The project is sustainable through continuous Research and Development (R&D) to enhance the tools and methods we use for big data analytics, text mining, and natural language processing. The project is also sustainable through responding to user's feedback.

Social Watcher promotes WSIS values related to the proper utilization of ICT to deliver analytics and insights related to the local political and social issues discussed on social media. The use of Big Data analytics and visualization, Artificial Intelligence, Text Mining, and Natural Language Processing helped Social Watcher in providing its audience with a clear and dynamic picture of the public opinion trends, sentiment, and interaction on social media in addition to the change in these aspects over periods of time. Moreover, the project promotes WSIS values related to Access to information and knowledge. This is achieved through our web platform which is an open access platforms that allows free access to our reports, infographics, and analytical interactive dashboards, charts, and data. Our web platform represents a digital public archive of reports, analytics, and data related to the political and social issues discussed on social media in Kuwait. This also helps in bridging the Digital Divide in the Kuwaiti Society and represents a successful model of utilizing ICT application in all aspects of life. These factors help in building an inclusive Information society in Kuwait in accordance with WSIS action line entitled “ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life”. In addition, the project promotes WSIS values related to "Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs". In this respect, Social Watcher platform helps in highlighting and countering spam, automated, and fake social media accounts and contents and the usage of these accounts and contents to spread rumors and fake information among the Kuwaiti society. Social Watcher uses Artificial Intelligence, Big Data analytics and visualization to identify spam and bot activities on social media like Twitter bots. In this respect, we identify and highlight such activities in our reports to allow our audience to distinguish real contributions on social media from the propaganda/bot contributions that try to influence the public openion.