Online Political Media: Twitter activity on the run-up to the Scottish Referendum

The case: The Scottish referendum for independence from the United Kingdom was held on the 18th of September 2014. What was assumed to be an easy victory for the unionist cause became quite ambivalent on the final weeks of the contest, eventually won by them with a 55% majority. A number of commentators (Cairney and McGarvey, 2013; Keating, 2014; Sharp et. al, 2014) viewed this period to be a critical time for Scottish devolution, even before there was any indication that the status quo may be upset. The data & analysis: From the Twitter Decahose (a random 10% sample of all Tweets), we collected ~900,000 Tweets containing the hashtag “#indyref” from ~175,000 users in the time period of Jan 1, 2013 to Sep 30, 2014. We focus our analysis on networks constructed from Twitter users mentioning other users in their Tweets. These communication networks show a low level of reciprocity indicating a high level of users talking “to” instead of “whith” each other. Based on the dominant use of hashtags from the yes/no campaigns we classify users into these two groups and reveal that most reciprocal interaction happens within the two groups. However, we also find “activists” predominantly interacting with different-minded users. In an overtime analysis we study the change in networks as the two campaigns unfold and we also use real world events (e.g. publication of polls) and show their impact on the Twitter networks.