Thread by @marcowenjones

[Data Thread] I haven't done a British politics thread in a while, but was curious about public anger towards @MattHancock ! What follows is a thread analyzing those who've tweeted at Hancock since beginning of June. #sackmatt #thematterisnotclosed

2) First, I scraped around 23,361 tweets. As you can see, there is a big spike in tweets to @matthancock on 25th June, when news of his kiss properly broke. (nb: The scraping method doesn't include all tweets, and tends to favour more recent tweets from what I can tell)

3) Since the same people probably tweet at @matthancock a lot, I removed duplicate tweeters using an algorithm. This resulted in around 15,175 unique users tweeting at Hancock. As you can see, the pattern of tweets is roughly the same #sackmatt

4) I did a corpus analysis of these tweets, analysing them for the most common word. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common word was 'resign'. (I am excluding matthancock and https as they are just account data). 11% (1591)of 15175 tweets from unique accounts

5) used the term resign. And if there was any doubt, the context for using the term resign was almost always a demand that he resign. That's a lot of people asking Hancock to resign #SackMatt #TheMatterIsNotClosed #matthancock #matthanock

6) If you analyse the progression of tweets today and tomorrow, you can see there is an increased percentage today of people calling for @matthancock to resign - possibly due to continued anger, perhaps due to the video of the kiss being released. If we assume the data scraped

7) disperses error evenly then we can assume a greater percentage of people are demanding that Hancock resign today than yesterday (certainly on Twitter - even though we have a bit less data today). 24 % of tweets at Hancock today call for him to resign, compared to 16% yesterday

8) It would be interesting to keep tracking this trend, to see the extent to which public anger at Matt Hancock rises and eventually falls. In theory sustained or increasing anger may lead to his resignation, and it would be interesting to see what the threshold is.

9) I may add some network analysis later but that's it for now. To some up, the major mood to Hancock today is a demand to resign. This trend is increasing, and might continue to increase if public attention remains fixed and captured by the issue! #sackmatt