Jason Akermanis follow up
This isn’t much of a follow up. I was out walking after having read a few chapters in The Australian football business : a spectator’s guide to the VFL / Bob Stewart and I began wondering if there were some geographic pattens in who was condemning Jason Akermanis on Facebook, where condemning equals joining a group or liking a fan page that criticized his comment.
There were two real options to create comparisons: Get information from a few of the smaller groups with 10 or fewer members and declare them representative of each position or find a larger sample and get the network affiliation for all members of the larger group. I decided on the second. Jason Akermanis is a homophobe. is a Facebook group that has gained 281 members since May 20 for a total of 427 members. It appears to have been created directly in response to Jason’s comments and could be seen as condemning them. When scrolling through the membership list, I found 24 people who listed a network they belonged to. We’ll call this the dislike Jason group. As a control group of people who “like” Jason, I chose The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society. It had 457 members on May 22, up only three from May 20. 24 people in this group also had a network listed. This group should be his fanbase. Their lack of quitting should not be read as supporting his comments: Non-action does not imply support. I’m mostly after the idea of are these two separate groups similar based on location. The following table was generated after tabulating how many people from each group listed specific networks:
| Network | Dislike | Like |
| Ballarat | 1 | 0 |
| Binghamton | 0 | 1 |
| Box Hill High School | 1 | 0 |
| Burnside State High School | 0 | 1 |
| Cairns State High School | 1 | 0 |
| Charles Sturt University | 0 | 1 |
| Deakin | 1 | 0 |
| Esperance Senior High School | 0 | 1 |
| Essendon Keilor College | 0 | 1 |
| Flinders | 0 | 1 |
| Griffith | 1 | 0 |
| Haileybury College | 0 | 1 |
| Heathfield High School | 0 | 1 |
| iiNet | 1 | 0 |
| Illawarra Sports High School | 1 | 0 |
| Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School | 0 | 1 |
| La Trobe University | 1 | 2 |
| MacKillop College | 0 | 1 |
| Metso | 0 | 1 |
| Mirrabooka Senior High School | 0 | 1 |
| Monash | 9 | 1 |
| Newcastle | 1 | 0 |
| Overnewton Anglican Community College | 0 | 1 |
| Star Of The Sea | 1 | 0 |
| Star of the Sea College | 1 | 0 |
| University of Melbourne | 1 | 2 |
| University of New England | 1 | 0 |
| University of Sydney | 2 | 0 |
| University of Zimbabwe | 0 | 1 |
| UNSW | 0 | 1 |
| UWA | 0 | 1 |
| Victoria AU | 0 | 2 |
| Wesley College | 0 | 1 |
The simple answer appears to be yes, there is a difference between the two. Fans of Jason appear to be more evenly distributed across various networks. Of the high schools and colleges I could easily identify, 3 were in the dislike Jason group and 7 were in the like Jason group. 18 university students joined the anti-group versus 13 in the like group. (These numbers are probably off. I’m not completely familiar with all the schools involved so some were not counted.) This suggests that university students were more likely to condemned the comments compared to high school students… or at least, university students were more willing to indicate their displeasure on a public profile. That is a bit interesting. It would be nice to have a Facebook data miner so I could see if larger patterns like this existed.