Race to Aras 2018, A review of week 2 on Twitter

Week 8th to the 14th of October.

It’s week three, so let’s up our data game a bit! This week I did of couple of extra things.

• The most popular tweet of the week
• The online sentiment feeling towards each candidate
• The presence of bot accounts (More detail here!)
• Word clouds for candidates

Overall this week, we see more tweets about #Aras18 than last week. A RED C poll suggested MD on a comfortable 70% of votes, followed by Sean G at 13%. …

Week 1st to the 7st of October.

It’s week two, the canvassing is in full swing and we’re all already sick of it.

Following my work last week, here is a review of the second week of the Race to Aras an Uachtarain. This post will cover,

• The most popular tweet of the week
• The online sentiment feeling towards each candidate
• The presence of bot accounts

This week we see less tweets overall, improved sentiment for liadh ni riada but also the possibility of some bot accounts for her?

Tweets this week (Inc retweets) : 7072

Tweets this week (Exc…

Week 24th to the 30th of September.

Although nominations for the Aras where submitted several weeks ago, this is the first week where the race really started. Key candidates launched their campaigns, the first live debate took place on RTE 1 radio, and the ever familiar sight of election posters have graced our public roads.

Over the coming weeks before the election, I hope to do a short review of how the previous week played out on Twitter. I’l be scraping tweets related to the election, and posting some “interesting” information such as

• The most popular tweet of the week
• …

As part of my research, I was recently given access to a academic dataset containing the posts and comments of Reddit users who had be identified as having a certain medical diagnoses.

For obvious reasons, I won’t mention the dataset, but the purpose of this post is to demonstrate how extraordinary easy it was to re identify an “anonymised” dataset, and in almost 70% of cases, a single Reddit post can correctly identify the original user.

The dataset contained 100 ~ Reddit users who had posted a comment on a certain medical themed sub reddit. The users post was then…

#SolidariTea was a worldwide event held in support for four female lecturers in NUI Galway (Ireland) who have been fighting gender discrimination in their experience at NUI Galway.

Supporters of the lecturers were asked to “Raise a cup of coffee or tea and tweet the hashtag #SolidariTea to show support” on the 8th of December 2017. The hashtag briefly trended within Ireland during the day, and was reported on by Irish Times.

I finally got around to performing some brief python analysis on the event through the use of extracting tweets which contained the #SolidariTea hashtag.

Disclaimer. Extracting tweets is…

On Thursday evening Micheál Martin’s evening statement in the Dáil sent shock waves through both the Irish government and the general population. Openly declaring he would support repealing the 8th amendment despite the Fianna Fáil Ard fheis voting against the amendment is considered by some to be one of the dramatic statements in the Dáil since Enda Kenny's historical speech on the Cloyne child abuse report.

Still, Micheál Martin is just one of 216 elected members of our Dáil and Seanad, so how important is his stance overall?

The Irish Times have kindly taken the time to collect some data…