Net Neutrality debate has been amplified a lot across social media, using the dedicated hashtag #netneutrality. In order to understand what people discussed about, what terms have been used and by who, we chose to observe twitter for two weeks—from Nov 25th to Dec 7th 2014—collecting all tweets containing the hashtag #netneutrality. Data have been obtained with the TCAT tool. 47852 tweets have been analyzed, with 7520 users involved (authors and\or mentions).
The Bipartite hashtag-user graph shows the co-occurences of hashtags (the blue and red nodes) and users — the grey ones arranged in a circle. The bigger the circle, the more the related hashtag has been used. Depending on the content, each hashtag has been labelled with blue or red, referring to technical vs ethical terms.
Since the high number of users and sub-topics, twitter users have been divided into three sub-groups basing on their activity and influence (see below). For this reason the Bipartite hashtag-user graph provided by TCAT has been divided into three sub-graphs, by filtering the nodes and edges in Gephi.
#TelecomProm has been the most co-hashtag used during the two weeks analyzed: it refers to the annual Federal Communications Bar Association dinner, where telecom lobbyists, executives and government officials take part alongside communication attorneys, occurred on Dec 4th 2014 in Washington DC. Many protesters, who were outside the venue waiting for FCC’s Tom Wheeler, used the hashtag to spread their contents, using other hashtags such as #savetheinternet.
Among the co-hashtags used by most active users, who have a higher frequency of ethical hashtags, it’s remarkable noticing some topics related to protests against police violence: #icantbreathe, #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter.
Technical hashtags are prevalent in the most influent users group: most of them (#digitalsinglemarket, #broadband, #roaming) refer to the EU Digital Agenda and the Internet Governance Forum 2014, held in Rome on Nov 25th 2014.
