(Reposted from http://socialmedialab.ca/?p=1711) When it comes to tweeting about the upcoming election, Canadians are showing their famous sense of humour. Based on a sample of over 14,000 messages posted on twitter with the hashtag #CNDPOLI (collected between March 26 – April 3), we found that of the tweets that did express sentiment (6,860~49% ), about 65% expressed positive sentiment, and approximately 35% expressed negative sentiment.[1] This finding is contrary to what one would expect from a polarizing topic such as politics. It is also very different from previous analysis of election related tweets. For example during the 2008 Presidential election in the US, researchers from Rutgers University and Yahoo found that the majority of tweets posted during the live presidential TV debate were negative.[2] To find out why our dataset contained more positive tweets than negative, we decided to examine the actual content of the tweets in our dataset, using Netlytic, a web-based text mining and social networks discovery software package that we are developing at the http://socialmedialab.ca/and IBM’s ManyEyes to visualize our findings.
The tag cloud above represents the 50 top trending topics on #CNDPOLI last week; the larger the word, the more often it was mentioned. Although Harper and Ignatieff (or ‘iggy’) are often mentioned in tweets, a famous Canadian comedian and TV host, Rick Mercer (@rickmercer), is holding his own for election coverage on twitter. Content from his tv show and twitter feed is very popular and often retweeted, the title of this week’s blog is in fact a quote from the comedian being circulated by tweeters talking about the election. It refers to Elizabeth May’s debating abilities, and was likely highly retweeted because of the recent controversy over the decision to exclude the Green Party Leader from televised debates. Pictures from Mercer’s twitpic account are also often retweeted by followers, and YouTube videos from his CBC show, the Rick Mercer Report, are also making their way through twitter conversations about the elections.
Mercer’s twitter feed has become even more interesting lately when he issued a challenge to Liberal leader Michael Ignatief and Conservative leader Stephen Harper to a 1-on-1 debate in Massey Hall.
To which the Liberal leader answered “I’m in”.
Tweeters are still awaiting Harper’s response.
Bellow are examples of other humourous users-generate contents being shared on twitter under the hashtag #CNDPOLI. Electoral leaders seem to be fair game for tweeters, who ingeniously and mercilessly make fun of their leaders in many YouTube videos. A mashup of Stephen Harper and Star Wars is one of the most popular, along with a video of Ignatief dancing to some soulful Latin music, and a clip of two babies talking to each other, supposedly representing the liberal and conservative party leaders. Links to pictures and cartoons are also popular in tweets about the election candidates. The amount of Twitpics (pictures posted to Twitter) is also impressive. But interestingly users are doing more than just linking to pictures posted by somebody else, instead tweeters are creating personal pictures and other humourous self-created content. This shows a high degree of personal engagement by many twitter users in this election. Getting into the spirit of an election, tweeters are voting in a contest for the best party’s website error page. The NDP are winning this vote, with a page displaying “Ottawa’s Broken. And so is this link. But we have a plan to fix both” being mentioned most often. The liberals get an honourable number of mentions for their image of Canadian geese carrying away a deer. The importance of parties’ online identity is clear in this contest, as is the inclusion of humour in their image.
Although the upcoming federal election is not an event many Canadians were hoping for, tweeters are making the best of the situation by poking fun at it. Serious tweets about party platforms, campaign promises, and each leader’s past actions make up the majority of tweets about the upcoming election, but with national media personalities like Rick Mercer, and a tradition of finding humor in serious situations, Canadians are increasingly turning to social media to share ideas and debate issues that are near and dear to them. Whether this humorous slants in the tweets will continue as the election date draws closer is anyone’s guess.
Visit http://socialmedialab.ca/ later this week for the next installment in our on-going analysis of how the election is being played out Twitter and other social media platforms.
*Katheleen Staves, Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai contributed to the writing and analysis for this post.
Footnotes:
[1] As measured by SentiStrength, a sentiment analysis (opinion mining) program.
[2] Diakopoulos N.A. and Shamma D.A. (2010). Characterizing Debate Performance via Aggregated Twitter Sentiment. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1195-1198.