Description
The Tree Map grouped the name of supporters by kind of company and shows the level of companies’ engagement operated on their own websites. The supporter names come from the battleforthenet.com that is an online campaign organized by Free Press, to protect the Internet neutrality. The names in the visualization represent the companies that have signed in to participate to the online protest. Starting to this information, we investigated on their websites, to find out if they had any sort of reference to the battle they signed for. So, we checked on their official websites the contents related to Net Neutrality. The companies in blue are the ones that have an entire page dedicated to Net Neutrality on their websites. The companies in light blue had written some posts or articles related to the topic. These kinds of classification depend on the websites structure, but also on the level of engagement. In the majority of cases, an entire page or section dedicated get more relevance than a post written in a blog, mainly because the page is always visible and achievable. The grey names stand for the companies we did not find any link related to Net Neutrality of. In these cases, the companies signed the petition on battleforthenet.com but they did not take any action on their websites.
In this section, we focused on the websites showing a banner linked to the online campaign. Banner is a heading appearing on a web page in the form of a bar, column, or box. It links you to a particular page, in this case to the battleforthenet.com page. We decided to examine in depth this section, because we identified in the use of banner a visible bearing action done by the supporter. The number of websites using the banner is very small. Only nine on the whole number use it. The giff shows a sequence of banners screenshotted from the websites. The frames under the giff display the position of the banner in the page. We summarized the positions in three categories: when the banner is in the middle, when it is on the top and on the left corner. The majority of the banner used are created from battleforthenet.com that made available a reusable template. Only few banners are personalized and own created.
This framework summarizes the amount of companies divided by the level of support. The left side represents the quantity of websites that have a page dedicated, posts on their blog or no links found related with Net Neutrality. The right side focuses on the Twitter activity of the companies that have no links related to the topic. We did not base our answer only on the companies’ websites, but we considered the companies’ social activity as well, because some supporter websites are not developed or aimed to the public communications. So, we selected Twitter as the main social network related to the debate. It is the first one appearing on Alexa.com organic traffic (Protocol 0) and also the primary result in the social category, if we search on Google for Net Neutrality. We checked the posts on Twitter to confirm our first visualization, but the answer we got confirmed what we supposed: a lot of companies that are inactive on their own websites are active on Twitter. Because of that, we decided to focus on Twitter account, after this firs section.
The visualization shows the level of Twitter activity related with Net Neutrality, operated by the supporters. For this part, we focus on the last year activity. The number of posts is by month. The peaks correspond with the main events already mentioned, during the first part of our project. During the data collection, we discovered that a lot of supporters were active during the Action Day only. Because of that we decide to colour the line by the activity regularity. The companies that posted frequently are in light blue. Orange and Yellow line indicate the companies that were active only during some limited occurrence. Then, we crossed the information obtained by companies’ websites and Twitter account to understand which companies are part of both two groups.
Protocol
For this Protocol, we start from battleforthenet.com, that we considered as the most relevant source to speak about the supporter. We had to identify the supporter name from a logo list. In some cases, it was easy, because the name appeared with the logo. When this did not happen, we used Google Image research, putting the images in the search bar. Then we searched the websites for each company. We used an online tool, called Web Pulse, to categorize the websites by kind. When the tool did not give us any result, we categorized it manually, using the same categories provided by the tool. Inside the websites, we looked for a section or page dedicated, or posts, when the websites had a blog area.
After a preliminary Twitter analysis, we decided to extend the Twitter analysis to all the supporters. So, we traced the Twitter account of each company and analysed the post during the year. From the previous analysis, we realized that a lot of companies, that never published contents, wrote a post in correspondence of July 2017, when the Action Day announced by battleforthenet.com. took place. So, for this last phase we focused on the current year, to check the regularity of the companies’ activity. We proceeded shrinking with the data collected. We grouped the companies considering their websites and Twitter activity to obtain the companies more involved. We categorized the name obtained considering the type of each websites from a previous protocol to discover which kind of websites were more engaged. The category of “Political and Social Advocacy” is the one that have more results because their kind of work. But also, there are a lot of companies belonging to the “Technology and Internet” and “News and Media” category.
Data
Timestamp: November 2017
Data source: Battle For The Net, Web Pulse, Twitter Advanced Search
Download data (108KB)
The list of supporters supplied by battleforthenet.com was composed by pictures. We built our dataset rewriting the companies’ names, starting from the logo images. In some cases, Web Pulse worked giving two undersections of categories for each website. We considered only the first and the main one to gather our supporters. We fixed as Page dedicated, Post on blog and No link found the three levels of advocacy and we divided the websites starting from these categories. We collected the Companies’ Twitter account and then we analysed for each company the social interaction related to the topic, counting the post they written during a restricted time.