2014 was an historic and tumultuous year with larger-than-life stories at home and abroad. When news breaks, and it broke quite a bit this year, Twitter and other social media is increasingly the place we check first. It’s where we debate, hash out, and explore every angle.
Twitter is also an invaluable source of data about the national conversation. And being data people, we decided to dig into more than 184 million Twitter mentions across 80 different news events this year to look back on what actually mattered, and to who. Our findings are displayed in this infographic:
To quantify the year in news, we decided to go beyond standard social monitoring, which counts overall mentions and layers on (highly imperfect) sentiment analysis on top of it. Twitter itself may be a biased sample, so overall volume and sentiment may not be as useful without a way to correct the bias and hone in on the specific groups you care about.
Through a process we call Optimized Listening, we build highly tailored lists of Twitter accounts and listen to all their public tweets, rating each group’s relative interest in different news stories, cultural trends, or political leaders. To analyze the year in news, we started with political insiders (a Beltway-centric list of influencers), and highly-followed conservative and liberal activists. We then stacked them side by side and compared their relative interest in the news stories and personalities that shaped 2014.
The intertwined cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner rated as the top story among all users on Twitter this year, followed by the midterm elections, Ebola, the Israel/Gaza war, and Iraq. But the order for political insiders was a bit different, with the midterm elections far and away the most mentioned, followed by Russia and Ukraine, Iraq, Obamacare, and the Ferguson/Garner cases.
Oftentimes, the stories that “break through” beyond elite circles are cultural touchtones that deal with issues of race and gender — the Ferguson shooting, the #BringBackOurGirls response to the Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, and racial comments by former L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling.
We also find that the use of Twitter is often oppositional: liberal activists were more than 3 times as likely to mention the Republican Party in their tweets than their conservative counterparts, while conservatives are more than twice as likely to mention President Obama, controlling for the overall volume of news conversation in these groups. This will likely surprise no one who has spent more than 15 minutes following politics on Twitter, but the data validates and lets us put a number on it.
Have questions about #TheYearInNews? Let us know on Twitter or get in touch.