That was fast! Twitter and hot political news
G. R. Boynton

At 10:56 p.m. on January 5, 2010 the word went out -- Senator Chris Dodd had scheduled a press conference for the next day to announce that he would not seek re-election and would retire from the Senate when his term ended in 2010.

One of the regularly noted features of Twitter communication is: the word goes out fast. Usually the word has been about airplanes falling into the Hudson River or earthquakes in California or storms and mudslides in Asia. [Shankland, 01/07/2010] Twitter users have often been first on the scene for natural and man made disasters. Does the word go out fast for hot political news as well as for natural disasters? Senator Dodd's announcement is a chance to shed a bit of light on that question.

During the fall of 2009 and into 2010 -- October 3 through January 4 -- the average number of Twitter messages referring to Dodd had been 58 a day. The hint about retirement produced a deluge. In the next four days there were 5470 messages mentioning Senator Dodd, and almost all were in reference to his retirement.

The second message was: "RT @TheFix: Chris Dodd to step aside tomorrow. http://tinyurl.com/y9eddrd." It is a retweet, which is the classic practice for spreading the word -- as much as anything can be classic given the brief existence of Twitter. Someone known as TheFix sent the first message with a url to a source document, and it was picked up and forwarded over and over, 63 times in the next few minutes.

And the stream became a trickle with this plaintive message: "The Chris Dodd news was awesome at first. Now it just sucks, as polls show the two GOP candidates getting annihilated. Oh well, it IS Conn."

The first hour, 10:56 p.m. to 11:59 p.m., there were 1249 messages about Dodd retiring.

Hour 2 it was down to 659 messages, and it fell through the night. In the morning it recovered averaging around 200 messages an hour from 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. when, in anticipation of the press conference, it rose to 344. Messaging faded quickly after that, and was down to 51 by 3:00 to 4:00 that afternoon.

For a moment Chris Dodd was 'trending' -- as Twitter specifies trending topics. Twitter lists topics that are receiving high levels of attention from twitterers. In the first hour of January 6, 2010 the topics that were trending were: Chris Dodd, Nexus One, Goodnight, Lakers, #willgetyourejected, and #nowplaying. I did a search for each term with a search for Chris Dodd first and then last. In each case I found 1,500 messages, which is the most Twitter will deliver to a single search. So the comparison is the time involved in producing the 1,500 messages which gives the messages per minute.

#willgetyourejected was the big winner with 65 messages per minute. The search at 12:14 found 18 messages per minute for Dodd and the search at 12:25 found 17 per minute. This was the lowest for the trending topics at that point, but it was enough to be trending. Trending is 'hot topics.' Chris Dodd was, for that moment, a hot topic.

'Big' and 'hot topic' are relative terms. What should we make of this rush of twitter messages? First, Chris Dodd is not a major national figure. He was a distinguished Democratic senator from Connecticut for 30 years. He was an inept candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party in 2008. As a committee chair in the senate he was important in the legislation about re-regulating the financial sector of the economy in 2009. But he was not a major national figure. That his announcement about not seeking re-election should produce enough messages to become a trending topic is a hint about how major a political event must be to become a hot twitter topic.

Another way to assess what it takes to be a hot topic is to compare this to other 'spikes.' When the publication of Sara Palin's book was announced, December 15, 2009, the three days December 15, 16, and 17 produced 5,007 twitter messages, which is approximately the same as the Dodd announcement.

Both produced noticable spikes, but neither was as impressive as the spike that greeted the announcement that president Obama would receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In that case there were 77,000 messages in the first day and a half.

I conclude there are enough political aficionados, who surely should be understood as opinion leaders, using Twitter to make research feasible, interesting, and productive for understanding our politics. What they write, as well as how much they write, is important for interpreting contemporary American politics. It is work just waiting to be done.

Methodological note:

Up to this point Twitter will produce no more than 1,500 messages per search, and the time period covered can be no more than ten days to two weeks or so. Hence, Twitter messages have to be captured in real time. If not they are effectively gone. This may well change in the future, but that is the state of research on microblogging today.

I capture messages from Twitter using a program, Archivist, that does a search and adds the results of the search to a file it builds. It will search continuously though that is not often necessary for political messaging. The data collection is a continuous process. I decide what topics to search for, what wording to use in the search, and I run the program frequently enough to capture the full stream. The numbers used here are derived from these data collections. All of the message streams I have collected are available at There's a hashtag for that.

Stephen Shankland (01/07/2010) Google real-time search: 6 min. to spot quake, DEEPTECH, cnet news