American Woman - gender analysis of Romney / Obama Twitter fans

Estimating gender, be it online or in real life, can be a hazardous matter with significant impact should one err.  Just ask my female friends Nick and Joe, or my male friends Michelle and Evelyn. Still, we can have fun trying. I humoured myself by working out that the majority of women behind Women 4 Shariah were, in fact, men earlier this week and thought I'd take the opportunity to have a glance at the US elections.

For this I selected Women for Romney Ryan (650 followers) and Women for Obama 2012 (2,228 followers).

I'd like to start by admiring Women for Romney Ryan's pluck. When they heard of my intentions they responded with:

@geoffsshortsSure go ahead.....;-)
— Women 4 Romney/Ryan (@WomenforRR) October 26, 2012

and seem like a good-natured bunch.

On to the figures. I can only guess gender for folk who provide a first name. SuperWoman 2.0 seems to be voting Obama, for example, but it's not a first name my script recognises so it will show up as unknown. Similarly, guessing the gender of the Romney Ryan fan "Saving California" is beyond the capabilities of my script. To save you some effort with calculators I'll be showing stats once with the unknown tally included, and once without.

Women for Romney Ryan

 

Women for Obama 2012

 

So in summary @Women_For_Obama has 3.4 times the number of followers, and less than half the percentage of male followers of @WomenForRR.

Ann Coulter - NSFW

The NSFW in the title of this post could stand for Not Safe For Work. The language used is far from that I normally employ, so be warned. Alternatively it could be the initials of Not Suitable For this World, a suitable epithet to describe Ann Coulter.

You've likely seen the tweet where she chose to make fun of the developmentally disabled. John Franklin Stephens, a Special Olympics athlete, has already written an excellent response. Late to the game and in the presence of a more powerful writer I'll restrict myself to some Twitter analytics.

First I tried to pull all negative comments sent to Ann Coulter. Unfortunately the thunderous volume of response was such that I had to restrict myself to a mere two hour window. Despite the short timeframe it contained over a thousand tweets, overwhelmingly negative. Hats off to the ambitious Tweeter who tried to make the hashtag #crawlbacktoyourcavecunt. Not a term I favour, but I respect your spirit.

Here's a wordcloud of tweets sent to Ann in that time. Link to John Franklin Stephens' blog post removed, as were some common words.. Click for a larger version.

And now the hashtags:

#1in88 #2012 #anncoulter #anncoulterscockhole #anncuntler #asshat... #AutismSpeaks #canSheDieNow #character #Classy #congrats #Coulter #crawlbacktoyourcavecunt #cunt #debate #Douchebag #downsyndrome #dumbass.. #dumbbitch #EducateYourself #EraseTheRWord #evil #evilheartlessbitch #fact #fb #Forgettable #forreal #FuckAnn #FUckCoulter #getaclue #GOP #growup #guessnot #Hitler #howdoesitfeel #hurtfulwords #hypocrite #Hypocritical #ignorance #ignorant #insanity #inspirational #itsokay #itsthetruth #JohnFranklinStephens #justsayin #khq #killitbeforeitbreeds #learnalesson #legit #lmao #loser #makesesick #MalalaYousufzai #MarkLevin: #mediawhore #message #moreeffective#hateful #moron #nary-a-peep #notabigdeal #outofthefryingpan #pathetic #PC #professionalism #proudofobama #puzzledlookonmyface #R #ragebait #realtalk #reputation. #respect #RETARD #Romney #rude #Rword #sarcasm #scary #shame #shameful #sinister #sitdown #SomeoneThatDumb #somethingbothpartiescanagreeon #specialolympics #spreadtheword #stayclassy #stfu #StupidPeople #tcot #thinkaboutitbitch #ThinkLongTerm #trash #ugly #watchwatchasay! #whoyouhurt #youcangetitallday #yougotserved #YouLearnedThatSomewhere #you'regraspingatstraws

Tweeters are imaginative. I had planned on reproducing them all, but you really should just view them yourself. Retweet and join in!

Nick Griffin Followers In Their Own Words

Some may have found my earlier article on Nick Griffin a little harsh. Pointing out that a significant number of his followers consider him a waste of perfectly good carbon may have created a negative impression of the chap. In the interest of balance I've decided to allow some space for the genuine fans of Nick Griffin to let us know a little about themselves.

Below are Twitter biographies and Tweets from his real supporters, unedited and untruncated. They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps. Start by judging how some of Nick's followers choose to describe themselves in their Twitter biographies:

Spot The Difference

The Make A Wish Foundation in Ireland helped Joshua be a pirate for the day. He won a cutlass fight with the real John Sparrow. With their help, Erin trained as a knight and stormed a castle to rescue a dog. They've helped seriously ill kids meet Metallica, Ronaldo and Barney. It's hard to read their stories without moist eyes.

In an earlier episode I wrote some notes on a rather different group, the Make It Happen Foundation. A self described charity, the organisation is not on the Revenue's list of approved charities. The director and other members are refugees from Children To Lapland Appeal, an organisation stricken from the list of approved charities and wound up for failing to pay its suppliers.

Some of these munificent members hail from the same original travel agency, bereft of aviation licence for reasons perhaps too lengthy to recap. They earn their crusts by encouraging volunteers to take sponsored holidays. Funds raised are devoted to buying holidays for children, their families and their parents. If the conflict of interest in this rather inefficient model is not apparent I encourage you to read the earlier post.

A new member unconnected with previous enterprises has come to my attention: their marketing development executive, Brian Ó Súileabháin. I'll be spelling his name in Irish - I don't think errors made in the early stages of one's career should be the first thing Google returns, but you can see the English spelling above. Judging by the common spelling mistakes, retweets and times spent online he also controls their Twitter account. He received a rather irate tweet from Bath Marketing:

When Is A Charity Not A Charity?

I've been considering using my powers more positively. I certainly don't regret exposing oddities through Twitter metrics and will likely continue to do so. But it would be nice to also build up as well as tearing down.

With that in mind I was happy to be followed by @MIHFIreland, a group who describe themselves as "a new Irish Charity set up with the sole intention of helping children Nationwide with serious illness [sic] & disabilities."

Broken link, inconsistent capitalisation and grammar aside, it seemed a worthy endeavour. I saw they had only 266 followers - perhaps if I ran some Twitter metrics I could help them get a wider reach?

With that in mind I started research. Their main focus seems to be taking children on a two day visit to Santa in Lapland for the princely sum of €999 per adult and €899 per child. Plus €150 registration, naturally. To fund these trips they encourage charitable-minded folk to raise €2,750 per person to take a holiday in the Philippines. Personally, if I sponsor someone, I expect them to suffer.

Curious to find out more I checked the Revenue's list of authorised charities for the Make It Happen Foundation and found them absent. My eyebrow raised in surprise I checked to see if their address was listed: perhaps they had changed names recently. No joy.