It's a global shoutout Mr. President

We have global communication -- YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. What is assuredly correct is we have global media. They provide communication technology that reaches around the world. That is one conception of global communication -- everyone, the world over, can use the same transmission technology and reach from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else using that technology.

But we might mean more by global communication than a characterization of communication technology. We might mean that communication is not bounded by the lines we draw in the sand that we call nations or by cultural divisions in which we grow up. We might mean communication that comes from every region and culture.

Communication via Twitter is one stream we can check to determine how global the communication is. Twitter is now, by the middle of 2012, 400 million messages a day. Roughly half of the messages are from 170 million accounts in the US and half are from the rest of the world. (siteimpulse, 11/07/2012)

Is there something to which people all over the world want to add their two cents?

One possibility is the election of Barack Obama to a second term as president of the US. The campaign inspired very substantial communication. Election day set records for messages about a single subject. There were 31 million tweets on election day. (Sharp, 11/06/2012) "Four more years" accompanied by a photograph of the president and his wife hugging set the record for retweeting. As of November 12 it had been retweeted 83,281 times. This was definitely a big shoutout.

But all, or nearly all, of the 31 million might have been posted by users in the US. There is no guarantee the communication was global, that is, from every region.

I collected a sample of Twitter messages mentioning president Obama November 1 through the election on November 6. The search terms for the collection were: obama, barackobama, and obama2012. Barackobama is the user account name of the president on Twitter. Obama2012 was the campaign Twitter account. There were many more tweets mentioning Obama than either barackobama or obama2012.

The number of messages in the sample is

My sample included 472K on November 1 and grew to almost 1.2 million on the sixth. Since there were 31 million tweets on the sixth this was a one in thirty-one sample that day. As samples go these are big numbers.

It is users and the location of the people posting messages that will indicate how global the communication was during these six days. The number of users posting a message mentioning the president ranged from 277K to 887K. A lot of people wanted to have a say on election day. The number of tweets per user indicates that people were very likely to post more than one tweet per day. The number is smallest on election day when the messages were congratulations, which needed to be said only once.

How many of these users were from the US and how many are from another region? We know that if Mr. Obama had been running against Mr. Romney in almost any other country of the world he would have been heavily 'favoured' to win. (BBC News, 10/22/2012) He was favored by 72% in France, by more than 60% in Australia, Kenya Nigeria, Canada Panama, UK, Brazil, Germany, and only in one of the 21 countries surveyed did Romney come out ahead of Obama. That one country was Pakistan where Mr. Obama is known largely for drone attacks on terrorists with collateral damage.

Time zone information is available for most user accounts, and that is the geographical identifier used. (see note on Twitter geo codes) The question is: how many users from outside the US used Twitter to express their opinion of Mr. Obama?

On average 40% of the users posting a message mentioning president Obama were from outside the US.

The top ten time zones were:

Atlantic time leads the six day total. It is eastern Canada and Puerto Rico but not continental US. It had the largest number of tweets for the six day period. But the time zone with the most tweets on election day was London. Twitter reported 31 million tweets on election day, and this sample was almost 1.2 million. To get a very rough indication of the volume of traffic I multiplied the number of election day messages in the sample by 30. This is, at best, a rough estimate, but it suggests that one fifteenth of the messages on election day were posted from London and the Atlantic time zones. The top ten are composed of time zones from western Europe, Canada and South America. But Casablanca and Hong Kong are eleven and twelve.Once past the top ten the number of messages is smaller, but they come from all over the globe.

It was a global shoutout Mr. President. All over the world people were inspired to communicate their enthusiasm for your re-election.

Note

Twitter geo codes: when one opens a user account on Twitter you are asked to set up a profile page that includes photo, header, name, location, website, bio, and other information. This location appears on the profile page. Many users either do not supply a location or the location designated is a bit of humor. However, Twitter knows the time zone from which the account is being set up and it automatically sets this information. If you select edit profile you go to the form that includes a slot for location, and you can change location from there. It is only if you go to settings that you find the time zone assigned by Twitter. This appears to be the full set of time zones Arizona to Zagreb. It can be reset, and one might want to reset it when moving from one time zone to another. But this is only seen by the account holder so there seems little reason the do anything other than leave it as set by Twitter. Time zone is not a very specific geo code, but it does permit comparison across large geographic areas. In the sample one quarter do not have a time zone designation.

References

BBC News US & Canada (10/22/2012) BBC poll: Rest of world favours Obama

Sharp, Adam (11/06/2012) Election Night 2012

siteimpulse (11/07/2102) Twitter 2012 - Facts and Figures (infographic)

© G. R. Boynton, 11/13/2012