Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Labour Twitter Ghetto

I'm a sucker for a great visualisation and yesterday I came across a great one which used Tweetminster's political twitter data to visualise the connections between different groups.

It 

It shows some quite interesting features. Firstly that the Lib Dems are far less clustered on Twitter than any party (and far less prevalent as well) but also that Labour Tweeters are far less likely to be connected to other non Labour Tweeters than any others and so are one of only three main clusters. The blogger refers to it as the Left Ghetto.

Not that there isn't some ghettoisation in the Conservative tweeters also but it appears significantly worse for Labour supporters. Why does this matter, well during the election, which was as you may remember Twitter obsessed, Labour were applauded for having the most success with Twitter and therefore winning the online campaign (although of course subsequent research has shown that taking into account Facebook, websites and email this wasn't the case). However this data shows what we always suspected during the campaign, there may have been more people Tweeting from the left, but they were mainly talking to each other, not the public.

The other surprising thing (for him anyway) that came out of this analysis though was that Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murphy is the centre of the Political Twitter universe, connecting more people to each other than anyone else!

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