A day in the life of Rush Limbaugh on Twitter

Rush Limbaugh’s been a pretty hot topic lately, and he’s certainly been a popular discussion on Social Media.

In the 24 hours preceding 8pm EDT (which is midnight, GMT), there’s been roughly 14,000 tweets that include “limbaugh” in the contents, or about 10 a minute.  Keep in mind that it’s a weekend, and Rush hasn’t said anything on the air since Friday …

Sentiment

Some breakdown of the sentiment in those tweets (click on chart to enlarge):

52% of the tweets registered as weakly or strongly negative, while 21% registered as weakly or strongly positive.  That’s no surprise.  No matter who’s talking about Rush or their position, they’re probably not happy about what’s going on. See the comments at the end about limits of sentiment analysis.

Hash Tags

One thing that is always interesting is the use of hash tags (#winning).  These are unstructured and uncontrolled, and so it is purely convention that is adopted by Twitter users.  For the posts that talk about Rush, the following are the top twenty hashtags:

HashTag Count Percent
#p2 824 9%
#limbaugh 585 6%
#stoprush 583 6%
#tcot 544 6%
#boycottrush 536 6%
#gop 262 3%
#taxpayerfunded 245 3%
#flushrush 232 3%
#rush 194 2%
#snl 186 2%
#waronwomen 182 2%
#gamechange 158 2%
#cnn 147 2%
#fem2 126 1%
#tlot 109 1%
#topprog 107 1%
#ows 102 1%
#rushlimbaugh 94 1%
#teaparty 93 1%
#news 82 1%

#p2 is the has tag for “Progressives on Twitter”.  I was surprised to see it as the most popular tag.  #tcot is “Top Conservatives on Twitter”. #fem2 is for feminists. #tlot is “Top Libertarians on Twitter”.  What’s interesting is that there is no hashtag which is reaching critical mass.  If you were to search for just #stoprush, for example, you would get only a tiny fraction of the posts about Limbaugh.

Twitter Users

There are no clear “top posters”; the most frequent poster is “Miaminonymous”, who appears to just retweet everything, with 131 posts.

The top 25 people mentioned in tweets are:

User ID count % of Mentions
@thinkprogress 480 4.0%
@hipstermermaid 320 2.7%
@limbaugh 310 2.6%
@huffingtonpost 191 1.6%
@credomobile 182 1.5%
@politico 167 1.4%
@addthis 158 1.3%
@shoq 153 1.3%
@superguts 152 1.3%
@denisleary 152 1.3%
@billmaher 133 1.1%
@youtube 131 1.1%
@politicususa 121 1.0%
@tmorello 118 1.0%
@theblaze 117 1.0%
@cdibona 114 1.0%
@mediaite 112 0.9%
@anonyops 112 0.9%
@sandrafluke 102 0.9%
@thedailybeast 95 0.8%
@rushlimbaugh 92 0.8%
@krystalball1 80 0.7%
@boingboing 76 0.6%
@stoprush 70 0.6%
@thedailyedge 70 0.6%

Interestingly, @limbaugh is not the twitter account Rush uses, @rushlimbaugh is.

Comments

What I make of this

Rush Limbaugh is still a hot topic in social media.  I would expect that tomorrow, Monday, if there is significant news related to Rush (more advertisers pull out or he says something controversial) we will see a spike in topics.  On the other hand, if something else rises to the top of the news cycle, we may see Rush take a breather on Twitter.  It is interesting that the conversation is still scattered — huge numbers of disconnected users and hash tags.   There is not one conversation taking place; there are thousands.
Limits on Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a mechanical assessment of the sentiment, positive or negative, in a tweet.  It does not necessarily indicate approval (if positive) or disapproval (if negative) of a particular subject.  Consider some contrived examples: “I hate the constant criticism of Rush” is negative, while “I am so happy that Rush is losing advertisers.  I love the ones who are quitting” is very positive.  The sentiment generally tells us whether the statement is happy and upbeat or negative and downbeat.  In large numbers, it is a crude assessment of a topic like I am using it in this post.