140 characters. That’s not a lot of space to say anything yet millions of people use Twitter everyday to do just that. This is especially true with politics. During the recent federal election, almost a million tweets were posted in Canada, all talking about the campaign.
One of the things we’re exploring at Samara is exactly what this online political conversation looks like. How informative is the political Twittersphere? How interactive is it? And what are people talking about?
To help answer these questions, we did a quick and dirty pilot study to see what a political discussion on Twitter looked like. We pulled almost 150 tweets* posted between June 21 and July 11 that talked about Senate reform.
First, the political conversation on Twitter appears to be very time-sensitive. Most of the tweets on Senate reform happened on day one of the news story when the government tabled reform legislation. For each subsequent day, the conversation’s volume decreased exponentially, essentially dying off a week later. The online political Twittersphere seemed to have moved on to other topics.
There is also some question about how people are talking about political issues online. Are people simply preoccupied with the strategic horse-race aspects of politics? The winners and the losers? Or are people talking about the substantive issues?
On that front, our initial data show that the Twitter conversation is pretty varied. Roughly a third of all the tweets we looked at talked about the strategic “politics” of Senate reform. Another third talked about the substantive issues surrounding the idea of Senate reform. A little over a quarter talked about the specifics of the process of getting reform passed, including such issues as constitutional barriers. Many tweets talked about multiple issues at the same time.
It also seems that the main purpose of using Twitter is, not surprisingly, to share links and information. A whopping 87% of all the tweets we looked at shared a link to an external website, while 27% of tweets retweeted or mentioned something another user said.
Lastly, there is some evidence that Twitter users are somewhat more likely to voice opposition rather than support about political issues. For the most part the tweets we looked at were neutral about Senate reform. But almost a quarter of the tweets in our sample explicitly expressed negative comments about the issue, outnumbering expressions of support by a factor of four.
There’s a lot more research to do on all these fronts. In the coming days and months, we here at Samara will be looking at a lot more tweets, a lot more issues, and a lot more aspects of the political conversation. We’ll also be looking at both institutional and social media.
But it does seem very clear that Twitter is an intriguing and enticing place to look to understand the political conversations that are happening in Canada everyday.
*The tweets were compiled using the Twitter search engine
Topsy, we compiled all the posts mentioning “senate reform” and using the
#cdnpoli hashtag, removing duplicate tweets.