Ozzie Sport

The last post? It leads me to believe that you cannot use tweet volume by electorate to predict the outcome of that electorate’s voting. In most cases, the sample sizes were just too small: 1 to 10 tweets. There might have been more tweets coming out from that electorate but they weren’t using party names, acronyms or the names of the major party leaders. An already small sample of say 50 tweets from an electorate could be whittled down to 5. (I could go back and redo that, try to get more tweets, include post election tweets and see if the results changed… but I’m not certain the point. If some one gives me an incentive to do that though, it will be done.) Twitter doesn’t appear to have any meaningful predictive value on that level… or even on a broader level (where Labor was mentioned almost twice as often as the Liberals. The best suggestion could be that the overall trend is that Labor and Green supporters engage in the usage of social media more than their Liberal, National and Family First counterparts.)

That said, I still want to analyze these patterns. I generally avoid content analysis but this is interesting and some what relevant to an important topic. (Will Tony Abbott win and adversely effect my desire to stay in the country post graduation? How will the elections impact the country’s spending and the value of the USD, which I rely on to pay my bills in Australia?) I asked an acquaintance what analysis she would like and she suggested sentiment analysis post election results. (Are people on Twitter happy with the results?) I’m not a fan of sentiment analysis for a variety of reasons… It isn’t easy to do and is rarely accurate. The easiest way to do that would probably involve letting people judge the attitude of Twitter folks towards the election based on the most popular #ausvotes related hashtags.

To do this, I went to searchtastic and searched and searched like I did before (using the following searches: #ausvotes, #asuvotes, gillard, abbott, greens house, greens senate, #sexparty, #familyfirst, #nbn, #campaignbender, ranga julia, #vote9, #hungparliament, hung oz, #auslabor, Australian sex party, #9votes, #laborfail, #myliberal, Joe Hockey, tony julia, Maxine McKew, Wyatt Roy, wilson tuckey, Stephen Fielding, Steven Conroy, bob brown) . I found over 10,000 total tweets using these searches. I then removed all tweets that were posted before Aug 21 2010, 0:00 UTC. This time would be 21 August 2010, 10:00 AM Canberra time. People had started voting by then and most of the election vote getting had been done. That done, I had 7,985 total tweets. The next step was to remove all duplicate tweets. The tweet total is 3,372, which looks like a pretty decent sample size.

After that, I extracted all the #hashtags from these tweets. These 3,372 tweets had 4,354 #hashtags used in them. There were 420 unique #hashtags. The table below is a count of the most popular #hashtags used after Aug 21 2010, 0:00 UTC where the tag was used at least twice:

Is there any sentiment being expressed by people interested in the Australian elections that you could take away from this? Probably not. The extent to which I’d say any attitude is being expressed is that people do not want Abbott to come out on top and that they blame Labor for this failure of having a clear victor and functional government. It could also possibly be read that people are concerned about the impact of the elections on Internet censorship and infrastructure in Australia. (Though #nocleanfeed could refer to the Wikileaks story. People often use that #hashtag to discuss the site.) Marriage equality and civil rights are viewed as being a post election concern. And I suppose you could also conclude that Australians are keeping their sense of humor about themselves with their use of various puns and sexual references.

Rather than do another post, I’ve decided to tack on a list of URLs that were mentioned. From that same list of 3,372 tweets, there were 516 total urls included in the tweet. 297 of them were “unique.” (I haven’t lengthened all of the URLs so there may be a few repeats using url shorteners that I can’t easily lengthen.) The following URLs were the ones that were all mentioned five or more times:

It is an interesting selection of links: YouTube, Facebook, ABC news, Yahoo News, Labor’s website, TwitPic, and YFrog (a picture). The only really official content is that from Labor. Despite the #hashtag popularity of the Sex Party, people weren’t linking to them. People also weren’t linking to Get!Up content on their site. They weren’t linking to other official party content. The message in this case is clearly in control of voters and the media, not the parties.

Anyone have any more suggestions for what to write about in terms of the Australian elections before I go back to sport?

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