Mark Blevis

Since the election began, the issue that grabbed the greatest single-day chatter was coalition; March 26, the day the election was called. Coalition was mentioned in more than 2,600 tweets that day alone, and coalition held the single day pole position for 16 days.

That changed yesterday with the story about the draft report by the Auditor General. The report includes a chapter which examines spending associated with the G8 summit, including $50M on improvements that the Auditor General suggests was spent by the Conservative Government after misinforming Parliament. Now we’re in a he-said-she-said situation with a whole lot of talk about reports and the language contained in them — reports Canadians won’t see until the election is done.

I have not seen the reports. However, hearing the various parties comment on them reminds me of the movie Wag the Dog and how the politicians invented stories and provided fake footage which, in a very satirical way, is meant to throw opposing politicians off the game and reassure the public that all is well within the camps they support.

So, how did the online traffic shake out? 24% of yesterday’s election-related Twitter traffic (4,000 of nearly 17,000 tweets) was about the G8 report. Contrast that coalition represented 15% of election-related Twitter traffic on March 26. G8 also outpaced Twitter traffic on other leading online issues including taxes, Conservative screening of event attendees using Facebook, the one-on-one debate challenge between Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff, Elizabeth May’s exclusion from the televised debates (emayin) and the online launch of the LPC Platform.

This illustrates the issues which strike an emotional chord and/or present themselves as being clear and simple to understand are the issues that gain the most online traction… particularly on Twitter. By comparison, nuanced issues such as healthcare, education and the economy are getting very little attention online.

The graph of all analyzed media channels (blogs, news, forums, Twitter) looks very similar, with taller spikes.

Most of the Twitter traffic is driven by information made available in media reports. The Word Cloud allows us to identify which keywords the public have picked up on. The larger and stronger the word appears in the cloud, the more often that word is mentioned.

In the cloud that follows, the smaller words are far more interesting than the larger ones (since the large words are part of my search criteria). So, it’s words like (and I’m replicating them as they appear in the cloud, so spelling and grammar don’t count) spending, draft, parliament, costs, riding, leaked, quote (and its variances misquote and misquoted), baird, defend, misinformed, clements and rickmercer that tell us which words are sticking in Canadian minds — which parts of the story resonate and which direction the story may take. For campaigns, media and analysts, they tell us which trails to follow.

The BuzzGraph shows us how elements of the conversation are connected which provides more context to the terms that appear in the Word Cloud. There are three stages of connections; thicker more solid lines represent more frequent connections, medium solid lines represent medium frequency connections and dashes lines represent less frequent connections).

Here was see additional terms connected to the conversation. We see that Canadians are sharing links to articles, videos and other online content using URL shorteners (t.co, tiny.ly, deck.ly and yhoo.it). Canadians have connected g20 to g8 mentions (g8/g20) and are getting into additional details such as 50m representing the amount of money in question, suggestions that the alleged actions by the Government were illegal and where the money was spent (muskoka). Reading the graph, one can almost assemble the story.

Finally, this is an issue that, like most of the election traffic, lives within the amplifier effect of Twitter. Only 34% of the traffic was “fresh” content, 9% represents a conversation and 57% is retweets or re-broadcasts of the original messages and replies. Some people pre-pend their own comment to messages they “RT”.