The Australian Twitter News Index has been on hold for the past few months as we’ve adjusted our data gathering approach to address some changes to Twitter’s data gathering frameworks, and unfortunately this period has also included the U.S. election and its immediate aftermath. But we’re back in time to the inauguration of President Trump, …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, January 2017”
As the world turns its attention to the slow-motion car crash that is this year’s U.S. presidential election, September in Australia was a comparatively ordinary, intermediate month for news. A number of continuing scandals and controversies – including the donations affair engulfing Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, the Country Fire Authority pay dispute in Victoria, and …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, September 2016”
As the 2016 federal election campaign recedes into memory, online engagement with the news in Australia has returned to what passes for normality these days. This is also reflected in the news sharing activities we are able to observe in the Australian Twitter News Index for August: the long-term patterns of how Twitter users’ attention …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, August 2016”
This instalment of the Australian Twitter News Index covers the business end of the Australian federal election campaign, which culminated in election day on 2 July 2016 and was followed by a brief period of uncertainty over whether the Coalition government had in fact held on to enough seats in the House of Representatives to …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, June-July 2016”
As we conclude this very lengthy Australian election campaign, let us review how the candidates fared on Twitter these past two weeks. Our research tracks all tweets directed at or posted by the candidates’ Twitter accounts. This provides a more comprehensive picture than the comparatively more self-selecting election- and politics-related hashtags #ausvotes and #auspol. The …
Continue reading “#ausvotes: A Final Update from the Social Media Hustings”
We’re now well into one of the longest Australian election campaigns in recent memory, and close enough to election date that we should expect the general public and not just the usual political junkies to begin engaging with the parties’ campaigns. Time, then, to examine how the parties are faring on social media to date. …
This post follows on from a number of research activities we’ve covered here in the past. Last week, we released our CCI report Social Media in the Media, which shows the gradual acceptance and integration of social media into the practices of political communication. And in my last post, I outlined a new method for …
Continue reading “Follower Accession: How Australian Politicians Gained Their Twitter Followers”
As we count down to the Queensland state election date, I’ve just published a new piece about the Twitter campaign in The Conversation – head over to the site to read it there. The centrepiece of the story is this graph of @mentions of the two leaders’ accounts throughout the election campaign, though – it …
Continue reading “Mid-Week #qldvotes Update: How the Leaders Compare”
There’s just one more week to go until the end of the 2012 Queensland state election campaign – and as I write this, the tenor of the mainstream media coverage is that we’re heading for a landslide election win for the conservative LNP. So, let’s take another look at the way the election has played …
Continue reading “Queensland Election, Week 4: All Over But the Shouting?”
Having caught up with developments in week 2 in the previous post, let’s bring the story up to date by looking at activity patterns on Twitter during week 3 of the Queensland state election. This post covers the period of 5-11 Mar. 2012, then (except that 11 March isn’t quite over yet, so we’ll be …
Continue reading “Queensland Election, Week 3: The Twitter Story to Date”
