The spike in fuel prices has continuously risen along with the increasing prices of other commodities in the Philippines. On the other hand, this resulted in Filipinos bearing the brunt of these costs in their day-to-day lives.
After almost two and a half months of hikes in the pump prices of petroleum products, the Filipino people will finally get some respite starting Tuesday, September 26, as local oil companies have announced rollbacks, albeit it will only be by up to 50 centavos per liter.
In connection with this, a recent study conducted by Capstone-Intel showed that the topic “renewable energy transition” recorded a 38 percent negative interaction share in line with the issue of rising fuel prices online.
Capstone-Intel is a high impact research company which uses innovative research technologies, tools, and methods to convert data and information to breakthrough insights and actionable intelligence outputs. It is committed to help its clients solve problems, find solutions, grow markets and constituencies, build reputations, navigate risks, and manage crises; and to be the country’s leading private research and intelligence agency.
Methodology
Capstone-Intel utilized its customized social listening tools in order to gather data across all publicly available posts on social media from August 23 to September 23, 2023, in order to identify the sentiments of users about the topic.
Sentiments and interaction share
The data revealed that across all social and non-social media platforms, the topic “fuel prices” showed an 87% neutral sentiment about the issue, followed by a 10.7% negative sentiment and 2.3% positive sentiment.
However, when diving deeper into the online sentiments that triggered high interaction shares, the topic “renewable energy transition” received a total of 38% negative interaction shares online. It can also be noted that the remaining 54.2% of interactions were neutral, and only 7.2% were keen on the topic.
This suggests that amid the unstable rising prices of fuel in the country, even though 54.2% remains neutral about transitioning to renewable energy, it is paramount to note that the 38% negative interaction needs to be emphasized as to how this portion of users negatively discussed the topic online.
Meanwhile, other topics surrounding fuel prices, including “fuel price increase,” reported a 97% neutral interaction share, followed by “rates and inflation” with a 96.7% neutral share, and “cost of living” with a 79.9% neutral sentiment share.
The study stressed the need to identify the underlying factors as to why the neutrality of these topics emerged online during the duration of the study.
Facebook performance
In terms of the number of posts, the topic “fuel prices” has reported a total of 491 posts online, translating to a 4,882.9 engagement score. Itemizing these posts, it got over 3,038 comments, 3,529 social volume, 3,372 share count, and 12,071 total reaction count.
The following is the total number of reactions online referring to the issue:
- Likes – 8,103
- Love/Heart – 1,361
- Haha – 853
- Wow – 247
- Sad – 1,168
- Angry – 339
Upon analyzing the reaction distribution, the fact that Like and Love reactions reached the most significant reaction counts (a combined total of 6,464) and dominated the percentage indicates that most Facebook users produce positive reactions.
Note that according to the standards for scanning, the emotions “Like” and “Love” are considered positive, “Haha” and “Wow” are considered neutral, while “Sad” and “Angry” are deemed negative.
Top posts
Capstone-Intel also revealed that the story of political figure Lray Villafuerte, who eyes three-year tax cuts to slash power rates and fuel prices, was among the stories that emerged as the most engaging news reports, tallying a total of 572.7 engagement scores. This was followed by a news story about the recent pronouncement of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) approving the release of over P3 billion fuel in subsidy to the transport sector affected by the series of oil price hikes.
This story received a total of 450.6 engagement scores.
Top sources of discussion
In addition, news holds the highest number of discussions or posts that mention the keyword “Fuel Prices,” with over 240 mentions. This only indicates that media agencies have more often covered the issue than other platforms.
