1/ It’s a bit late, but here’s a quick look at SONA discussions on Twitter. This is based on ~424,000 tweets by ~114,000 Twitter users between last Monday 10th until this morning (Friday 21st). The vast majority of the tweets were generated during the time of the SONA though.
2/ Here’s the network of users discussing SONA. The EFF and RET communities group together. They increasingly sing from the same hymn book esp. wrt to Gordhan. Almost a quarter (23%) of all tweets came from this community. All together now folks: “Twitter isn’t real life”. 
3/ This chart shows the volume of tweets minute by minute. As mentioned, it spiked during the actual speech at ~2,500 tweets per minute (at least that's the max my systems were able to collect; could have been more). Conversation picked up a bit again the next morning.
4/ Here are some of the topics that came up in the SONA. The EFF managed to make it about themselves, although the FW de Klerk issue gained more traction than their real issue w/ Pravin Gordhan. We really are just a society of spectacle where grass-roots ideas aren't debated :(
5/ Here are the topic volumes during the SONA. Once the EFF (red) left the chambers, Cyril (green) got a lot more airtime. He also didn't see an immediate drop off in volumes but rather a steady decay as it got later into the evening. So I guess we remained engaged?
@jean_leroux @Arfness @AlduCornelissen @ChrisRoper @rayjoe @Billbobbird @ferialhaffajee @MaxduPreez @SongezoZibi @CoruscaKhaya @CyrilRamaphosa 8/ "SONA 2020: Ramaphosa gets his point across despite a Pyrrhic victory for the EFF" I turned this thread into a blog post here: superlinear.co.za/sona-2020-rama…
