An article in the Miami Herald suggests that George Zimmerman’s attorney will try to use Trayvon Martin’s twitter and Facebook posts to defend Zimmerman.

There is, of course, outrage at an attempt to blame the victim, but there is another reason why this is a bad idea: Trayvon is not here to defend himself and the posts might be used to improperly impugn his character.

The biggest problem with such posts is that we cannot reliably intuit the intent behind them.  Social media posts are often short, spontaneous, and may be anywhere from revealing the inner soul of the poster to play acting at a role that is distinct from the person’s character.

We should not be surprised at a teenager saying things that are outrageous, and we should not assume they reflect who Trayvon really was.

If Trayvon were still alive, he would able to defend himself and explain his posts. He would have a chance to say what he really felt — although we would still trip over the blame-the-victim problem.

But since he is not, his postings will be, at the very best, completely  uninformative. At worst, and more likely, they will be terribly misleading.  It would be a scandal if a naive jury took that as the basis of reasonable doubt.

Let’s hope the judge doesn’t allow this.

I needed a list of the twitter accounts US Senators are using, but couldn’t find any list that was up to date…

So I created one.  You can see it here or by clicking “Resources” in the menu above and picking the choice for US Senator Twitter Accounts.

Rush Limbaugh’s been a pretty hot topic lately, and he’s certainly been a popular discussion on Social Media.

In the 24 hours preceding 8pm EDT (which is midnight, GMT), there’s been roughly 14,000 tweets that include “limbaugh” in the contents, or about 10 a minute.  Keep in mind that it’s a weekend, and Rush hasn’t said anything on the air since Friday …

Sentiment

Some breakdown of the sentiment in those tweets (click on chart to enlarge):

52% of the tweets registered as weakly or strongly negative, while 21% registered as weakly or strongly positive.  That’s no surprise.  No matter who’s talking about Rush or their position, they’re probably not happy about what’s going on. See the comments at the end about limits of sentiment analysis.

Hash Tags

One thing that is always interesting is the use of hash tags (#winning).  These are unstructured and uncontrolled, and so it is purely convention that is adopted by Twitter users.  For the posts that talk about Rush, the following are the top twenty hashtags:

#p2 is the has tag for “Progressives on Twitter”.  I was surprised to see it as the most popular tag.  #tcot is “Top Conservatives on Twitter”. #fem2 is for feminists. #tlot is “Top Libertarians on Twitter”.  What’s interesting is that there is no hashtag which is reaching critical mass.  If you were to search for just #stoprush, for example, you would get only a tiny fraction of the posts about Limbaugh.

Twitter Users

There are no clear “top posters”; the most frequent poster is “Miaminonymous”, who appears to just retweet everything, with 131 posts.

The top 25 people mentioned in tweets are:

Interestingly, @limbaugh is not the twitter account Rush uses, @rushlimbaugh is.

Comments

What I make of this

Sentiment analysis is a mechanical assessment of the sentiment, positive or negative, in a tweet.  It does not necessarily indicate approval (if positive) or disapproval (if negative) of a particular subject.  Consider some contrived examples: “I hate the constant criticism of Rush” is negative, while “I am so happy that Rush is losing advertisers.  I love the ones who are quitting” is very positive.  The sentiment generally tells us whether the statement is happy and upbeat or negative and downbeat.  In large numbers, it is a crude assessment of a topic like I am using it in this post.