Towards the end of tonight's Australian election debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, I captured almost 2,000 related Twitter tweets per minute, and over 50,000 were captured during the hour. This has provided me with a mountain of data - so first off, let's look at the debate minute-by-minute.
In the chart above, we can see the subjects mentioned in tweets during the debate. The first spike in tweets was about immigration, after about ten minutes of the debate. A much larger spike in activity belonged to the economic discussion, at about 18 minutes.
The economy remained one of the most popular topics of discussion for the rest of the debate, except on three occasions. In the 23rd and 48th minutes, immigration and then the environment briefly overtook the economy as the most tweeted topic.
However, with only four of the sixty minutes remaining, the subject of same-sex marriage suddenly came up. This caused a spike from mere single digits to a massive 676 tweets per minute. This was more than double the maximum number of tweets per minute seen for the economy, immigration and the environment during the debate.
The economy remained one of the most popular topics of discussion for the rest of the debate, except on three occasions. In the 23rd and 48th minutes, immigration and then the environment briefly overtook the economy as the most tweeted topic.
However, with only four of the sixty minutes remaining, the subject of same-sex marriage suddenly came up. This caused a spike from mere single digits to a massive 676 tweets per minute. This was more than double the maximum number of tweets per minute seen for the economy, immigration and the environment during the debate.
Until about the tenth minute, it was fairly even. However, it appears that the audience on Twitter started to give Kevin Rudd the edge from that point onward. Rudd's votes continued to trend upwards, peaking at 119 Twitter votes during the 56th minute - the same time as the spike in tweets about same-sex marriage.
Votes for the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, peaked at 47 tweets per minute on two occasions during the debate. However, generally his votes plateaued in the low-30s for the latter half of the debate, significantly below the volume of support received by Rudd.
This post was subsequently republished on the SBS News site, with the authorisation of the author.
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