All Atwitter About Brexit: Lessons for the Election Campaigns

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Over the last few months, Brexiteers have conclusively won the air war on social media. Their clearly focused messages and emotionally appealing content has largely dominated the Brexit debate.

However, there are strong signs that the anti-Brexit community is full of latent energy. Those arguing against Brexit or for a soft Brexit have, so far, only managed to unleash this energy intermittently, but they are now on a strong rising trend (chart).

These are some of the conclusions to emerge from “ALL ATWITTER ABOUT BREXIT: Lessons for the election campaigns”, a report we publish today. We analysed over 10 million Brexit-related tweets among over 1.2 million users and correlated them with over 600,000 pieces of news.

Our findings reveal insights as to what causes individuals to switch between pro- and anti-Brexit positions and what lessons can be drawn for the upcoming election campaigns.

Comments

    • Joe Zammit-Lucia says

      Thank you for your comment. Good question. I don’t think it’s possible to distinguish between real posts and bots. But will look into it. Of course, even if generated by bots, activity still influences the feelings, opinions and actions of real users – which is why people use bots.

    • valerie Crawford says

      I am not a Bot. And I have a long e-mailing list of Anti-brexiteers who do not use use Twitter. The 100,000 people on the Anti-brexit march contained considerable numbers who had never been politically active in their lives ( like me) yet were now infuriated and seriously depressed about Brexit. And for me it gets worse with this election campaign. We are going to end up with a Fascist dictatorship controlled by the right-wing media.

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