Blurrt

Twitter reaction to Suarez ‘bite’

June 27, 2014 — by

The much publicised Luis Suarez incident has been at the forefront of news stories worldwide after the Uruguayan striker appeared to bite Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini in a crucial World Cup group game. With FIFA’s verdict relating to the incident due to be released yesterday, a Blurrt campaign was set up to collect all tweets relating to Suarez that also had relation to the incident. At around 14:50, FIFA released it’s decision that he had been given a 9 game international ban, a four month ban from all forms of football and a fine of 100,000 Swiss Francs.

volumeGraph

The Blurrt volume graph shows clearly how Twitter erupted as the news was released with tweets shooting up from approximately 200 per minute to a total of just under 5,000 tweets per minute at it’s highest. With such a high volume of tweets relating to such a controversial incident, the sentiment values of the tweets is interesting to dissect. A huge bias towards negativity can be seen with 40% of unique tweets having negative connotations, the retweet percentages back this up with 50% being negative.

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Most of the negative tweets are ones that reinforce the ban itself and expressing a sense of disgust towards the player’s actions. However, there are a few tweets from fans of Suarez’s club side Liverpool – these saying how the ban is unfairly hindering the team’s early season form.