How #FeesMustFall ‘won’ the week – according to Google
The student protests under the banner of #FeesMustFall dominated online discourse in South Africa, as students gathered in masses across the country to tackle the rising cost of university fees.
Google Trends, which tracks billions of searches across the globe, shows a clear rise in the #FeesMustFall tag, moving off of the Wits protests which started in the latter part of last week (16 October).
Despite the simmering down of searches for the Wits protest – so to speak – this week, on average, the term has dominated protest-related trends overall.
Google Trends on protests
Notably, using the Google Trends tool, it’s clear that two names spiked over the course of the protest week – Adam Habib and Blade Nzimande.
On average, President Jacob Zuma will dominate South African search over the course of the week by some margin. However, during the rise of the Wits protest, Vice-chancellor Habib’s name spiked to be almost on par with Zuma searches.
Over the course of the student protest hitting parliament, minister of higher education, Blade Nzimande’s name spiked in searches far above Zuma.
Google Trends on high profile persons
Students across the country are currently engaged in protest action at their respective universities, standing against proposed increases in fees for next year.
The demonstrations erupted at the University of the Witwatersrand last week, and quickly spread to other institutes across the country, including Stellenbosch, Rhodes and the University of Cape Town.
The protests moved on to take the fight to the politicians, marching on Parliament on Wednesday (21 October), while Finance Minister Nhalnhla Nene was giving his mid term budget speech.
Again, despite the usual weight given to this speech, the #FeesMustFall protest dominated discourse in the country.
While President Jacob Zuma said will be addressing students on Friday (23 October), protests at campuses across the country continued on Thursday.
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