Did the Republicans hijack the Hashtag #DontDoubleMyRate ?

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You see a lot of comments on Twitter and elsewhere that the republicans managed to hijack the hash tag #DontDoubleMyRate to use to express opposition to Obama.  Usually, these comments come with a lot of glee that the conservatives have out-smarted the liberals.

So, did the hashtag get hijacked?

In a word, No.

There were 48578 tweets between 2012-04-18 11:04:19 and 2012-04-28 12:49:03 that used the hashtag.  Of those, only 14% or approximately 7,000 contained anti-Obama or just conservative messages.  There were probably as many spam messages!

The conservatives can say, all they want, that they managed to take over #DontDoubleMyRate, but the facts in this case, as Steven Colbert says, have a liberal bias.

Methodology:

A random sample of 376 tweets out of the total 48578 were selected programmatically and then read, by me, to be assessed as being either “conservative” or not. I was generous in my assessment, as some tweets are not terribly articulate.  54 of them were plausibly conservative.  54/376 = 14.36%    Thus, the estimated percentage of “conservative” tweets is 14.4% +/- 3.5% with a 95% confidence level.  At a 99% confidence level, the +/- is 4.6%.

And the Sanford City Commission Gets Its 15 Minutes of Twitter Fame

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The Sanford City Commission voted to not accept the resignation of the city’s police chief, Bill Lee, sparking a round of comments on Twitter:

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It’s interesting that the talk on Twitter spiked the way it did — there does not seem to be sustained outrage, at this point, about the commission’s actions.

You can read the Orlando Sentinel article I linked to for coverage of the event, including the reasons given for not accepting the resignation.  Personally, I think it’s a bit of a gamble for the city.  If Zimmerman is convicted, then maybe pressure on the city and the police will fade away.  But if Zimmerman is not convicted, there’s going to be harsh questioning of whether the police’s handling of the case “lost the conviction.”  Pressure, then, to fire the police chief is going to be nearly irresistible, and the commissioners are going to face some awkward questions about why they didn’t take today’s opportunity.  And there’s going to be a lot more talking on Twitter about it.

Michele Bachmann’s Tar Baby

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I want to know who publishes the “Word a day” calendar on Michele Bachmann’s desk, because today’s word is obviously “Tar Baby”!  Perhaps she is confusing the term with “Red Herring”?

While her “Tar Baby” had the benefit of getting her back in the public eye, it inadvertently demonstrated one of the less offensive meanings of the term by sticking her with the more racist meaning.

And the racist meaning is getting her a lot of attention on Twitter:

Her office denies that she meant it in an offensive way, just saying that Obama “has gotten himself into a sticky situation.”   Just like Michele did…

Jeff Atwater Running for US Senate in Florida? Twitter is Showing Early Interest in Him!

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There’s twin stories that are being pushed through the media lately.  The first is that Connie Mack isn’t gaining traction in his bid to be the GOP nominee, and the second is that Florida state CFO Jeff Atwater is going to jump in the race because of that.  But as I’ve previously discussed, Connie Mack isn’t fading in twitter mentions, indicating stronger grass roots support.

The primary indicator we use to measure Twitter support is mentions: how many twitter users tweet (or re-tweet) something that includes the person-in-question’s name, hashtag, or user id.

So how has Twitter reacted since news of Atwater’s possible run surfaced?

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A pretty good spike on Monday — when the story broke —  but it started to fall off on Tuesday.  Connie Mack IV gets around 60 mentions a day, so Atwater is in the running on Twitter as long as he can keep the activity up.

And he does seem to be tweeting more frequently:

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To run for Senate, though he would need to up his level of Twitter activity quite a bit; at the moment, he’s in the doldrums…

I’ll put him in with the other three candidates in my periodic reviews unless/until he  drops out of the race so we can see how he’s tracking on Twitter in the future.