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[Thread] This is an animation of what #SackTomWatson looks like on Twitter, through Gephi. Will have a closer look at some of it to explain what it means or if there's anything worthy of note. #peoplespmqs
The nodes (circles) represent individual Twitter accounts. The lines between the nodes are tweets, retweets, mentions or replies. At the moment, the colours represent communities. Communities are a network of nodes that have interacted with each other on the hashtag. The green
community on the right for example, is clustered around @georgegalloway . I have made the size of node relate to the relative influence of someone in a given network. As you can see from the below image, George Galloway is an influential actor on #SackTomWatson hashtag. 
@georgegalloway That is no surprise, @georgegalloway has been key in getting this hashtag trending. We can also see from the previous image that @SocialistVoice is also quite influential of all the accounts in the network. They are not the most vocal though...
@georgegalloway @SocialistVoice If we resize the nodes so that we see which accounts tweeted the most (i.e. not most connected per se, but the most vocal), we can see this lime green community emerge in the lower left quadrant. These accounts generally tweet a lot, and I'd wager some of them are a bit dodgy.
@georgegalloway @SocialistVoice If I change the colour of the edges (lines between nodes i.e. retweets, mentions, replies tweets etc). We can see that a lot of the network is retweets (green). 43.7%. It may look more, but there is also a bizarre density of mentions (pink) between those slightly unusual
green accounts in the bottom left corner. This either means that the community are really chummy, or involved in a vicious Twitter dispute, or possibly trying to generate a lot of network traffic to facilitate a trend (or something similar). But you can see it is quite unusual
@georgegalloway @SocialistVoice There's around 2,184 unique accounts in this map. 115 of those accounts have 'Corbyn' in the bio - and either are, or want to appear to be avid Corbyn supporters. The most common word, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the bios, is 'Labour' - appearing over 300 times.
What surprised me the most if how outspoken so many of the accounts were. I've resized nodes by how many tweets an account has (historically). @s9tmt (in green) for example, has posted over one million tweets. @hazelglasgow -in orange, has around 630,000. So a noisy bunch!
@s9tmt @hazelglasgow So that could mean a lot of reaaaally passionate people who dislike Watson who spend most of the time tweeting/retweeting, or dubious accounts trying to give a greater illusion of radical support for Jeremy Corbyn, to promote division? Neither would surprise me tbf - The End
