Social Media Britain - November 2019

The key findings of the November 2019 edition of our new Social Media Britain report - powered by Synthesio - include:

• Overall Brexit continued to lead the conversation in November – however there was a 59% increase in NHS related mentions vs. October. This was driven in part by Corbyn revealing documents that he says indicate a Conservative government would sell off the NHS as part of a US trade deal.
• The general election, which is the focus of our deep dive this month, as well as the London Bridge terror attack - both contributed to sizeable shifts in social conversation.
• Following the ITV Leaders Debate, there was a sharp increase in conversation around the general election. The release of the Labour and Conservative manifestos seeing further spikes in volume towards the end of November.
• When comparing Johnson and Corbyn activity on Twitter in November there were some notable differences in the focus of their posts. Whilst Brexit was mentioned across 42% of Johnson’s tweets – it was only mentioned within 6% of Corbyn’s. Corbyn focused mainly on the NHS, which was mentioned in just over a third of his tweets.

Technical Note

Ipsos’s new Social Media Britain report offers an additional way to understand the public’s views about issues relevant to Britain. Social media are by no means representative, and many social media data are not accessible. (Nor should they be. For our views on the ethics of social media data, see this paper). Nor does our analysis take into everything that people in Britain talk about on social media over the period. Nevertheless, social media gives us an insight into people’s interests and concerns when we are not actively prompting them to think about a particular issue or topic.

Our analysis is based on a list of 21 topics tracked over the course of a year. We determined these topics by first analysing data from politically active forums and used text analytics-based analysis of these data to help us write queries in Synthesio. We leveraged the Synthesio platform to gather and analyse the data.