Category Archives: Cable Channels

The Twitter Passion of Touré

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If Esquire ever puts Touré on the cover of its magazine, it’s going to need to re-stage its iconic 1968 cover photo of Muhammad Ali.  Not in the ironic sense that they’ve done it lately, but in a sincere sense that it’s appropriate.  For there are few people who suffer the volume of unrelenting criticism, insult, and anger that is leveled at him on Twitter.   That activity tells us a great deal about social media’s nasty side, and is a cautionary tale for anyone who views social media as merely a sort of chatty email.

To get a sense of that nasty side, it’s interesting to do some statistical analysis on the Tweets he receives.  Using the last week’s activity on Twitter as a sample, I discovered some interesting things.  

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We Don’t Got Ed (Schultz)

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The announcement over a week ago that Ed Schultz would be moving his show to weekends came as a bit of a shock, especially since he did one more show before departing the airwaves.  It seemed hasty and poorly planned, without a really good (or believable) explanation for what happened or an actual date of when the weekend show will start beyond “April” (for those of us in the software business, a mention of just a month for a target date instinctively produces the cynical response “of which year?”).

Needless to say, this news set off a shockwave on Twitter:

Click on image to make it as big as Ed's heart!

Click on image to make it as big as Ed’s heart!

On the day of the announcement, conversation to & about Ed reached levels not since since the fall election.  And while Michael Eric Dyson has been doing a good job keeping the Ed Show alive on MSNBC without Ed, its clear that enthusiasm has waned with Ed’s disappearance. It will be interesting to see how the next week plays out …

I wish Ed a speedy TV return in early April — of this year 🙂

 

Catching up with MSNBC

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There’s no doubt about it, MSNBC has been on fire on Twitter as we close in on the election — people are talking more and more about MSNBC’s shows.  Let’s take a look at how the “Point of View” shows (which start at 3pm with The Cycle and run through Last Word plus Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry on weekends1) have been doing4:

The large spike was the night of the second presidential debate (or, “The return of the Jedi” as I like to call it) — about 100,000 mentions that night.  Just amazing. (Conversely, the drop in the middle of the chart was from the Olympics, which preempted much of MSNBC’s programming).

Here’s the charts for the individual shows.  For each chart, I’ve plotted the 7-day moving average2:

Up with Chris Hayes:

It really is going up.

Melissa Harris-Perry Show:

The Cycle (my favorite weekday show on MSNBC, I must admit)5:

(the recent spikes are around the debates).

Martin Bashir:

Chris Matthews:

His spike occurred during the Democratic National Convention, which is not surprising, since it was kind of all Chris all the time…

Politics Nation with the Rev. Al Sharpton:

Considering that the show doesn’t push social media as much as others, the Rev. is doing pretty good!6

But the next show in the line up3, The Ed Show, is the master of social media engagement:

Although the 7-day average doesn’t show it, on the night of the second presidential debate Ed got over 25,000 mentions.  That’s a lot of engagement.  I don’t know who on his staff handles social media, but they are a social media god.

Ed leads into Rachel Maddow who has the best rated show on MSNBC.  And while she doesn’t focus on social media like Ed does, she still pulls in strong engagement on Twitter:

Which leads us to the nightcap of MSNBC, the Last Word with Lawrence:

Considering that The Last Word has been a 4 day a week show compared to the rest of them up until the final sprint to the election, when Lawrence has been running 5 days a week, these numbers are quit competitive.

If you want to see, overall, how the various shows are doing, here’s a total of mentions over  the last few months:

I will point out that the daytime shows took a hit due to the Olympics, which did not affect the evening shows as much. Still, you can see that Ed is the king of social media at MSNBC….

 

Footnotes:

1 I have come to realize that many of the other shows should be considered “point of view” shows as well — certainly Morning Joe, Tamron Hall, and Alex Wagner have distinctive voices.  After the election I will track all of the MSNBC shows more closely.

2 A 7-day moving average adds up the most recent 7 days and then divides by 7, so the # gives you a sense of activity with the day-to-day noise filtered out.  It’s a good way of knowing if there’s a fundamental shift in activity as opposed to a one day spike.

3 Strictly speaking, Ed comes after the repeat of Hardball.  But we’ve already covered Chris’s mentions, so there’s no point in repeating his counts, just like there’s no point in watching Chris a second time in day ;-).  That time slot (or the earlier 5pm slot) would be better filled by a Joy Reid show, I know we can all agree. Come on, MSNBC, make it happen. If you’re holding that slot for Olberman to come to his senses, well, it’s time to move on…

4 I only track explicit mentions of shows, so thinks like the Education Nation or generic MSNBC references are not counted.  You can infer that the actual numbers would be higher…

5 It’s hard to get ratings for The Cycle (well, without paying for them), but I have to imagine that they’ve been given one of the worst time-slots available.  So I wouldn’t consider their level of overall social engagement to be a bad thing.  Still, there’s a lot they could be doing to better engage with social media besides having Touré hold down the night shift on Twitter by himself.

6 Funny thing about Al Sharpton: 25 years ago, I thought he was an opportunist and was suspicious of his motives at times.  Now I hold him in high regard.  Although we’re both older and more mature, I have to admit that I was wrong about him.  Sorry about that, Reverend.

DoS Twitter Spam in MSNBC’s Education Nation Student Town Hall #EdNatSTH

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Well, after writing in my previous post that Twitter spam always includes URLs, I was proven almost immediately wrong during MSNBC’s Education Nation Student Town Hall hosted by Melissa Harris-Perry.  In the middle of the show, approximately 1140 tweets like these flew by:

Click to enlarge

Note: If you don’t like seeing spam in your Twitter feed, please give my free Social TV Twitter client at http://tweetwatch.tv a try! It will catch these kinds of spam tweets, so even if Twitter’s getting deluged you’ll be sheltered from them.

Mind you, that wasn’t the only spam during the show.  The “normal” spam that tries to get you to click on the spammer’s URL was omnipresent throughout the show.  But this was different: it was severely disruptive and totally pointless: it aimed to kill the conversation on the hashtag altogether.

How was this spam done? All of these tweets were sent using the twitterfeed.com service.  It’s a tool that allows you to automate sending tweets based upon data you feed it. Virtually no other non-spam tweets were sent with these service.  Interestingly, twitterfeed.com is often used in “Silencing” attacks, where a huge number of critical tweets are sent to a person to try to chase them off twitter. (See this as an example).

Why was it done? That’s hard to say.  Maybe it was a misconfiguration of spam program that ended up with garbage messages.  If so, the person doing the configuration is horribly inept.  All their twitter accounts were sending the same set of messages to a variety of feeds, and all of the messages are garbage:

Notice the same spam accounts hit Up with Chris Hayes (#uppers) earlier this morning.

Is this a deliberate attempt to undermine the MHP Show?  That seems not to be the case, insofar as the spam tweets seem only focused on trending topics.  When the Education Nation Student Town Hall #EdNatSTH hashtag was trending, this attack was launched.

Is this a deliberate attempt to perform a “Denial of Service” attack against trending topics (by flooding them with tweets, it basically kills the conversation)?  That seems to be the goal.  It is basically just behaving badly for the sake of behaving badly. 

Could you just block the user and report them for spam and be done with it? Not really — so many fake accounts were used that it would be like whack-a-mole with a hyperactive mole.

One thing is for sure: Twitter should shut down the twitterfeed.com service immediately until it can better control the spam its users generate.  And Twitter should shut down these spam accounts: there are 1140 fake accounts out there that have spammed hundreds of times each and are continuing to spam as of this (9/23) evening.  Why doesn’t Twitter do anything?  They can’t expect people to return each and every one of the 1140 accounts.  We’re on the cusp of a breakdown in Twitter if they don’t do something.

One more plug: If you don’t like seeing spam in your Twitter feed, please give my free Social TV Twitter client at http://tweetwatch.tv a try! It’s spam free  🙂 and ad free. It’s your best defense against these spam attacks for now.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Risky Comments, and the Attack of the Misogynist Twitter Clones

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On Saturday’s (9/1) Melissa Harris-Perry show, the host made an animated defense of poor people, arguing that being poor was riskier than being wealthy.  It’s not surprising that her comments got a strong response from viewers, and it’s not surprising they were almost uniformly positive in their comments on Twitter.  What is surprising, however, is that 24 hours later the tone of the comments on Twitter had changed from positive to negative.  What happened? Were these real comments by people reacting to the video? Or was Melissa the victim of an orchestrated “attack of the clones” — a large number of  identical tweets that sought to change the public’s perception of events?

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