By popular demand, here’s part one of a first quick take on how Australia’s major political leaders fared with their appearances on the ABC’s Q&A programme, in the eyes of the (surprisingly massive) Twitter audience that Q&A manages to generate – for both of their appearances this week (Tony Abbott) and last (Julia Gillard), the #qanda hashtag became a globally trending topic.
Let’s begin with some baseline data (provided, once again, by Twapperkeeper): here’s the total amount of tweets before, during, and after the screening of Q&A on ABC1, hour by hour.
Some staggering numbers there – between 10 and 11 p.m. on Tuesday (i.e. during the second half of the programme, which starts around 9.30 p.m. AEST), both leaders comfortably beat the 10,000 tweets/hour mark. Also notable: there’s no significant blip a few hours later, when Q&A is screened again at 9.30 p.m. in Western Australia – so perhaps those WA viewers who are given to tweeting along with Q&A watch the programme’s online live stream rather than the time-delayed TV broadcast.
Before we get too excited about Gillard appearing to generate significantly more tweets than Abbott: a closer look at the data reveals some problems with the Twapperkeeper dataset from last night (and I’ve submitted a request to re-capture those #qanda tweets – it’s quite possible that they’re still simply too fresh to have been processed). Here’s the minute-by minute comparison of tweeting activity between 9 p.m. and 12 a.m. on each of the two Monday nights:
You’ll note that there are several periods of time (the longest between 22:18 and 22:27) when the Tony Abbott tweetstream simply flatlines. Now, anybody who was watching Twitter during Q&A last night would know that there were no such periods of total inactivity at any point – so clearly, there’s a problem with the data for the Abbott Q&A. What’s also obvious: during the periods where we do have reliable data, the volume of tweets on Abbott’s night is consistently above the volume on Gillard’s night. So, my guess is that with the gaps filled in, we would see significantly more tweets responding to Abbott than we did for Gillard – where during the programme, Gillard averages probably around 360 tweets per minute, Abbott looks to be closer to 530 tweets per minute.
(And that would also align with my observation that during the past week, Abbott was mentioned more often than Gillard in tweets using the general #ausvotes hashtag.)
But let’s have a look at the content. Following the same methodology as I’ve outlined here, here’s a list of the top keywords for the tweets during 9 p.m. and midnight on Gillard’s night:
(I’ve removed some of the more obvious or meaningless keywords from this list: Abbott, answer, Australia, big, didn’t, doesn’t, election, Gillard, good, great, hear, isn’t, JG, Julia, juliagillard, [I’/we’]ll, make, Mark, Mr, people, PM, qanda, question, real, show, thing, time, tonight, Tony, tweet, [I’/we’]ve, watch, and week.)
And the key phrases come in like this:
| FREQUENCY | |
| JULIA GILLARD | 811 |
| MENTAL HEALTH | 636 |
| TONY ABBOTT | 392 |
| SEX MARRIAGE | 342 |
| CLIMATE CHANGE | 330 |
| MARK LATHAM | 307 |
| REAL JULIA | 291 |
| QANDA TONIGHT | 284 |
| TONY JONES | 236 |
| GOOD QUESTION | 224 |
| MR RABBIT | 224 |
| MOVE FORWARD | 222 |
| GAY MARRIAGE | 214 |
| PRIME MINISTER | 209 |
| BOAT PEOPLE | 207 |
| QANDA JULIA | 185 |
| INTERNET FILTER | 159 |
| NET FILTER | 147 |
| ASYLUM SEEKER | 139 |
| ANSWER THE QUESTION | 133 |
| JOHN HOWARD | 131 |
| TOOL IS MARK LATHAM | 121 |
| QANDA AUDIENCE | 120 |
| MENTAL HEALTH IS A SECOND TERM ITEM | 109 |
| MILLION FOR A NET FILTER THAT WON | 107 |
| WORK BUT MENTAL HEALTH | 107 |
| MENTAL HEALTH FUND | 107 |
| CITIZEN ASSEMBLY | 96 |
No surprise, of course, to see Gillard and Abbott themselves mentioned frequently, as well as Q&A host Tony Jones and former Labor leader turned serial pest Mark Latham – subject especially of the following much-tweeted question-and-answer exchange:
‘How big a tool is Mark Latham?’ ‘There are some things that can’t be measured?’ #qanda
There are also the obvious comments about the then newly-unveiled ‘Real Julia’, her pronunciation of Tony Abbott as ‘Mr Rabbit’, and the discredited slogan ‘moving forward’ – however, it is evident that actual political and policy issues also rate highly.
Here, comments on Labor’s mental health policy are most prevalent (636 mentions); however, almost 100 of those mentions are from retweets of Chaser star Chas Licciardello’s line
RT @ChasLicc: I would have thought Gillard would be more open to mental health funding after the Latham episode #qanda
Tweets on same-sex marriage and climate change appear roughly equal in volume (342 vs. 330 mentions – but also note an addition 214 mentions for ‘gay marriage’, and 96 for the proposed ‘citizens’ assembly’ to discuss climate change); on same-sex marriage, there again are some prominent re-tweets boosting the numbers, but this time they’re topical rather than comical:
RT @dctcool: Same sex marriage should go to referendum RT If you agree #qanda
RT @samesame: You’re right Julia your answer on same-sex marriage does disappoint us. #qanda
Boat people and asylum seekers appear further down the order (207/139 mentions), again with a number of prominent re-tweets. And again, it’s the media personalities who supply the comedy:
RT @CatherineDeveny: What? 30 minutes in and no talk of boat people? This is bullshit #qanda
RT @safran_john: Idea for Refugee advocates: humanise boat people by calling them boat peeps. #qanda
While others remain more serious and focus on the topic at hand:
RT @wolfcat: here is an idea lets just use australia to process boat people #qanda
And of course the ‘cleanfeed’ Internet filter also appears, variously as ‘Internet filter’ (159) or ‘Net filter’ (147) – especially in the much-retweeted line
RT @xtensha: 40 million for a net filter that won’t work but mental health is a second term item… Get real Julia #openinternet #qanda
(Note that the bottom few lines of the table above are all subsets of the same retweet; WordStat can only capture phrases consisting of up to 7 words, so it chopped up that tweet in a number of different ways.)
And finally for a map of those keywords as they occur together (and those co-occurrences are necessarily skewed in favour of the most heavily retweeted phrases, of course – hence the conflation of mental health, the Internet filter, and Mark Latham into a cluster in the upper left corner):
So much for Gillard’s appearance, then – I’ll do Abbott once Twapperkeeper has caught up with itself…
Comments are closed.