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 circle packing diagram shows the most shared content via Twitter using the #netneutrality hashtag from Nov 25th to Dec 7th 2014. The grey clusters show the type of content: news, blog, activism and politics (divided into republicans vs democrats). Depending on the content, each link has been labelled with blue or red, referring to technical vs ethical terms.
Click on the circles to open the related content.
Starting from the top 30 links shared via Twitter using the hashtag #netneutrality, short URLs have been expanded to reveal that they were actually 21. A qualitative approach has been chosen to understand what these pages were talking about: we first divided them into the same categories used in the Google Queries Protocol (News, Blog, Activism, Petition, Politics, ISPs, CP). The color of the inner circles depends on the meaning of the shared pages, from a cooler blue (technical terms) to a warmer red (ethical terms).
Providing emotional and ethical content is usually the easiest way to push people sharing a lot. Blog and activism categories are the most shared, in which @Anonymous photos and @FightForTheFTR petitions take over. Mozilla Foundation and Google Employers use words like “save the internet” and “stand for open internet”; independent journalists (@theliveshowtv, @ProjectCensored) tend to post tweets urging freedom of speech and disapproving US Government choices. “The Jason Stapleton Program”, a YouTube show providing «daily in-depth analysis you won’t get anywhere else in the mainstream media that focuses on the principles of economics, capitalism, freedom and liberty», is the most shared content, though the datum is quite distorted (its main supporters seem to be fake accounts).
US Politicians are well lined up: democrats support Obama’s petition in favor of the Net Neutrality, while republicans and related lobbies use harsh words toward the President of United States.
European politicians are involved too: lots of “technical news” refer to a speech the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel took at the Vodafone-hosted Digitising Europe conference in Berlin on Dec 5th 2014, whose ideas are not so in favor of the Open Internet.
