Blurrt

Summer Budget

July 14, 2015 — by

So what was the reaction in the Twitter sphere to George Osborne’s, Summer Budget?

We tracked just the generic hashtag #budget2015 during and after the budget speech. The graph below shows the volume and intensity of tweets. This is a typical graph for live events and illustrates the nature of Twitter as a social platform. It is very much a conductor for live conversations which typically move on quickly to the next event or breaking news. In this case the peak was reached in the 20 mins immediately after the budget.

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So what were people most talking about? The overwhelming topic was the living wage, followed by the scrapping of student maintenance grants and changes to benefits affecting young people and the disabled.    

It’s probably no great surprise then to find an overall negative reaction to the budget.

Below is our ‘Twitter worm’ showing the balance between negative and positive reactions. In this case the overall balance was negative. 

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When we delve into that negative reaction further, we can see that there were some strong emotions attached to the topics of conversation. Below is a graph showing the make up of the reactions behind the sentiment, which clearly shows a considerable amount of anger and disgust.

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That groundswell of anger and disgust is best encapsulated in the following tweet, which was one of the most retweeted:

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These aren’t just the reactions of a handful of people in a traditional poll. At one point we were collecting 2,500 tweets per second and as you can see from the volume data, our analysis of reactions consisted of tens of thousands of people.