In the day following chancellor George Osborne’s statement, just short of quarter of a million posts were made on twitter discussing his Spending Review. To be precise: 249,332 posts were made remarking on his latest declaration and its consequences for the country between 12:33 on Wednesday when he began his statement, and 24 hours later.
As you can see from this graph, twitter engagement was at it’s highest during the statement itself and the subsequent response by John Mcdonnell the Shadow chancellor. As the day wore on, interest receded, before recovering slightly the following morning.
The majority of these (157,448 posts) were Retweets, whereas 91,884 were original tweets. The breakdown can be seen here:
What’s fascinating to observe here, is that the number of unique users that posted on the issue is extremely close to the number of original tweets posted, 91,836 unique users and 91,884 original tweets, whereas the number of retweets is over a third larger than both. This suggests that engagement with the spending review for most users either consisted of posting one or two ‘original’ tweets, and then sharing others’ posts, or simply just retweeting the musings of others.
As mentioned above the sentiment expressed by contributors was more likely to be neutral or negative than positive in nature, a fact that’s reflected by this graph of sentiment expressed.
Notice that the sentiment expressed only ventured into overall positive reactions at one point during the 24 hours following the statement.
Yet,the emotions people expressed about the review paint a more nuanced picture of public reaction. Upon observing the emotion wheel, a measure of how people reacted emotionally in their posts, we can see a plethora of reactions.
One would imagine that, with the sentiment reaction being so negative, that the overwhelming emotions expressed would be anger at cuts or fear for public services, but in fact expressions of happiness are seen in more posts than anger. 21.2% of posts were scored being angry in their intent, whereas 24.5% of posts expressed happiness in some way.
In terms of the topics that were mentioned the most over the day, tax credits, John Mcdonnell and Mao’s Little Red Book all featured prominently. Yet of the topics discussed over the day, the policy area which received most attention was that which was dubbed the ‘tampon tax’. using #tampontax, tweeters went at it to express their dissatisfaction with what was widely argued to be a tax on women.
From comparing this breakdown with the overall campaign stats given above, we can see that a much higher percentage of women posted under the hashtag #tampontax, even though there was more male reaction to the spending review as a whole. The emotions expressed were also much more negative in their scope, with the words ‘c**t’, ‘rage’ and ‘abhorrent’ coming at the top of the words used to describe the policy and 44.5% of tweets expressing anger in some form and 20.6% of posts expressing disgust at the Chancellor. Yet the sentiment score figures for this hashtag remain remarkably consistent with the campaign as a whole.
This may ultimately show the cleverness of Osborne’s Budget Review, while his political enemies attacked him from all sides, the content of his review and the method in which it was given, diffused any overwhelmingly negative reaction. Of those tweets that bore sentiment (roughly 40% of all posts) most were negative, yet as the sentiment graph above shows, this negativity never reached any violent extremes. The Chancellor can consider this somewhat of a victory, some of his political enemies who were surprised by some of his less expected announcements (keeping tax credits, not cutting police funding) may well have chosen to express their relief at his changes of heart, than express anger over their pre-existing feelings towards him.