Election Buzz: Week Three of the Ontario Campaign on Twitter
For their part, the Conservatives remain very much on message with their jobs plan front and centre, and so goes the conversation about them. On Twitter, mentions of the Conservatives remain overwhelmingly negative (65% negative vs. 8% positive) compared to the other parties. Even as their share of the conversation declines, it remains largely focused on the jobs plan, particularly the part about cutting Ontario public service jobs. Below are a few Tweets that represent the sort of week the Conservatives had.
While their new ads have been favorably received by party loyalists, discussion of the Liberals remains largely neutral (43%). Among the mentions that take sides, the debate is still much more negative (39%) than positive (18%). The positives largely depicted the Liberals as the most reasonable option. For the most part the negatives focussed on past Liberal "scandals" such as the stubborn legacy of the billion dollar gas plant boondoggle and past failures with key interest groups like teachers.
With the release of their election platform, attention to the NDP was split between positive (30%) and negative mentions (30%) with the balance neutral (40%). Although promises to freeze tuition and lower auto insurance gained little attention, the NDP's focus on wait times won some positives words. Still, negative commentators pointed to how the NDP plan is too similar to the Liberal plan and a loss of faith in her campaign among prominent NDP supporters.
On average Canadians engage on Twitter 1.49 times when discussing a public issue (average taken from Ipsos studies conducted throughout 2013-14) however, engagement around all three parties during week three of the Ontario campaign is considerably higher (3.19 for the NDP, 2.68 for the Liberals and 2.38 for the Conservatives) which means Ontarians are engaging in the election more deeply (with more back and forth discussion) than they have on past public issues.
Twitter use and online discussions of public policy and political issues skew heavily toward younger and higher educated Canadians but the debate is substantive and informed with 4 in 10 Ontarians talking politics and policy online and those most engaged much more likely to say that they are paying close attention to the Election (45%) vs. Ontarians who are not engaged online, only 28% of them say they are paying attention to the campaign.
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos Reid Twitter Analysis conducted between May 17 to 23, 2014. For this analysis a boolean search query was created to identify all English language Twitter discussions from people in Ontario that contained mentions of the Ontario NDP, Liberals, and Conservatives, and all mentions of the party leaders. Each party and leader were put in a separate search query so they could be compared. Official party Twitter accounts and some terms often associated with the federal parties were excluded. All Tweets were pulled from Sysomos between May 17 and May 23. The scan pulled in 39,881 Tweets between those dates. Of those, we pulled a random sample of 300 Tweets per party and coded them for sentiment.
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