In the 24 hours since the debate over British bombing intervention in Syria started at 11:30 yesterday morning there have been 670,610 tweets discussing the vote. In a mammoth 10+ hour debate, MPs discussed the arguments for and against British aerial involvement in bombing so called IS in Syria. 266,564 individuals either posted an original contribution to the discussion, or shared the musings of others, with a combined potential reach of almost half a billion people.
Of the tweets that bore sentiment, around twice as many of the reactions were negative compared to positive responses. The overwhelming majority of the tweets were retweets. As you can see in the above screenshot we see a slight difference in terms of sentiment between the tweets and retweets, with negative sentiment less likely to be expressed via retweet than in original tweets. Yet both figures are broadly consistent, especially considering the difference in volume between both figures, a fact that suggests a consistency to the makeup of the opinions being expressed.
Perhaps more telling than the sentiment breakdown are the emotions that those who posted on the matter chose to express. If we look at the emotion wheel for the entire period we see disgust, sadness, anger and fear dominating the discussion, with a sizable chunk of tweets expressing happiness and thankfulness towards the MPs debate.
When we take a close look at some of the language used within the debate, there emerge distinct patterns that go some way to explaining why the largest single emotion expressed was that of disgust, with over a quarter of contributors expressing revulsion at some point over the day.
The catalyst of much of the negative sentiment expressed was due to what many users felt was the jovial nature in which parliamentary business was conducted, especially considering the nature of the debate. ‘Laughing’ the third most used word in an emotional context, here may seem at first to indicate a positive reaction of some sort, yet upon conducting a further search we see it was predominantly referred to as an example in condemning the behaviour of MPs.
Here is a breakdown of sentiment for the word ‘laughing’ and ‘laugh’ during the debate yesterday:
As you can see, the reactions here are almost twice as likely to be negative than the overall discussion. A 10/1 retweet ratio shows it wasn’t merely a small number who were disapproving or MPs behaviour in the chamber.
With MPs this morning complaining about how users of social media behave when it comes to discussing issues on twitter and digital campaigning in general, it may be of some help to them to look as how their behaviour is perceived when conducting business in the House of Commons before giving tips on how to express oneself online.