27th
Sticking to the Facts (and using common sense)
We’d like to clarify a few facts in reply to a blogger:
1) Your estimate of our traffic is “slightly” wrong - we have 1.2 million page views thus far in January alone:
2) We are not funded by Politics Direct.
3) The assumptions that you mention, are yours, not ours - they are no where to be found in our report.
4) Common sense alone should tell you that the follower numbers per party will be influenced by the number of politicians on Twitter, especially if you read the next point.
5) Assumptions that you should make, but didn’t: a) besides the obvious overlaps, many MPs on Twitter actually have very different networks - this trend is more obvious amongst Labour MPs. For example Tom Watson MP has many followers not in the politics space. Most Conservative MPs are “discovered” via tweets from the party account or prominent bloggers b) There are 5 million Twitter accounts in the UK - it is much larger than the small network of our, and your, followers, and how people find others to follow varies. Twitter is also global - prominent MPs (like David Miliband for example) will have followers in other countries. c) The role of bots - wherever possible (i.e. when our scripts detect odd patterns) we exclude these -some accounts had significantly more than others.
6) The most important point - the over-emphasis on the importance of follower numbers: followers is just one metric, the report included many others - number of politicians, activity, mentions and RTs for example), and the summary of findings is based upon all of these - we never emphasised one metric over the other - others did this. We also outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the data-sets amongst both parties, as is clear in both the summary and if you look at all the data-sets together. Ironically mainstream (and more responsible) media properly reported on both sides of the coin (the FT titled for example: “Tory tweets pack more punch”). The focus on followers alone is not our position nor one that we fuelled (we actually feel it’s limited as blogged yesterday), but is what grabbed the attention within the bias debates’ of others.
