{"id":2890,"date":"2015-02-05T13:03:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T03:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/?p=2890"},"modified":"2015-02-05T15:52:21","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T05:52:21","slug":"libspill-a-helpful-social-media-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2015\/02\/05\/libspill-a-helpful-social-media-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"#libspill: A Helpful Social Media Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might have been forgiven for thinking that the time between the Queensland state election<\/a> in January and the New South Wales state election in March would be a little quiet, politically speaking \u2013 with the incumbent Queensland government on an overwhelming majority and the NSW government facing no serious challenge to date. As we now know, however, that\u2019s not to be \u2013 media speculation about a leadership challenge in the federal Liberal Party<\/a> following its Queensland counterpart\u2019s poor showing in the state election has now reached fever pitch, and every day brings new speculation not so much about whether, but when<\/em> Prime Minister Tony Abbott might be challenged by one of his cabinet colleagues.<\/p>\n

As with the previous federal leadership<\/a> spills<\/a> during the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, much of this speculation is circulating through social media. Back then, the #spill Twitter<\/em> hashtag became the de facto<\/em> gathering point for anyone following events; this time, #libspill has emerged as a major locus of discussion. And even beyond the hashtag itself, Australia\u2019s substantial community of politically-interested Twitter<\/em> users are actively discussing and evaluating the chances of the various contenders who have emerged.<\/p>\n

To provide an overview of those discussions, we\u2019ve teamed up with The Hypometer<\/a>, a commercial social media analytics start-up based at QUT, to track and analyse the discussion around the major contenders. Here, we\u2019re focussing on PM Abbott as well as ministers Julie Bishop, Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey, and Scott Morrison, each of whom is currently seen as a key potential figure in a post-Abbott government. Click on each politician\u2019s name to see an overview of the key tweets and Instagram<\/em> posts as well as images relating to their names; additionally, the colour of the bar beside each name indicates the overall sentiment of the messages relating to them (with the usual caveat<\/em> that social media sentiment analysis remains rather unreliable, so these indicators should be seen as approximations only).<\/p>\n