Brigid O’Keeffe

Kelsey Klemme

Kelsey

Health Care Reform and Twitter

A recent topic of interest for all political followers is Health Care and the new bill that is trying to be passed through congress giving health care to all people of the United States. This bill was a promise made in Obama’s campaign and he is quickly getting started on pursuing his options. The topic of Health Care is very broad so in order to acquire a more detailed amount of information we decided to research Tweets about Health Care Reform. We chose to use the term “#HCR” so that we could limit the tweets to people talking only about the Health Care Reform and people who were more educated in the topic because they were using the “#”.

We started gathering our data on Wednesday November 18^t, 2009 and concluded our data gathering on Friday November 20^th, 2009. In this time span we gathered 4988 tweets that included the term “#HCR”. This number was a very high number which was helpful in continuing our research because it gave us more data to work with.

“#HCR” or Health Care Reform, is any changes being made to the health care system. It is very popular today because of the large amount of changes that members of congress have presented in the recent health care bill. This change of health care directly falls under the umbrella of Health care because it is the description of how health care will be run.

A majority of the tweets included an opposing statement to the Health Care bill. Often times ridiculing what the congressman are doing and how it is not going to help the American people. Twitter is a way for people to communicate with not only the public but the congressmen to express their disdain or support for the bill. Also, because this topic is an American topic and will affect many American people we found little to no tweets in a foreign language.

Type	“#”	“RT”	“http://”	“@”
Number	4778	2819	2586	2744

Because our research topic included the term “#” all of the tweets included a hash tag. The hash tag allows the topic to be more specific and identified as the most recent discussion of Health Care Reform. Over half of the tweets included a “@” which means much of the discussion from this time period were responses to other Tweets, whether it was ridiculing what someone said or trying to support what they have to say. A majority of the tweets were also re-tweets which included a play-by-play of what was going on in the Senate and how the bill was being discussed there. The “RT” was also used by people to support something someone said, hoping by repeating it several times many audiences will be able to see it. Also, over half of the tweets included an “http://” which means that many of the tweeters were directing people to go find more information about the topic on other websites. This can be interpreted as a way for advocates of the bill to contact the public as well as those who dislike the bill.

The top 6 tweeters on the topic of “#HCR” were: GlobalHybrid (11.55%), thebighoot (10.98%), PublicOption4Us (5.28%), bountyofbeads2 (2.57%), Winterthur (2.43%), RobinGrantham (2.43%)

Name	GlobalHybrid	thebighoot	PublicOption4Us	Bountyofbeads2	Winterthur	RobinGrantham
Date Started	June 2009	April 2009	September 2009	July 2009	September 2008	July 2008
Status Updates	6043	6158	3981	6516	1245	16440
Following	2001	37	1984	1438	496	7159
Followers	817	542	924	681	390	7358

As seen in the table above the person who has been tweeting the longest is RobinGrantham. However this tweeter was only 6^th on our list of tweeters on this topic. He also had the most status updates as well as the most following and followers. GlobalHybrid, the tweeter with the most tweets on the topic with 11.55% started tweeting fairly recently and has a strong amount of status updates (coming in a close 4^th) and the 2^nd most following. It seems as though he joined Twitter in order to comment on the topic at hand rather than joining Twitter for several different topics

GlobalHybrid included some topics about general activities of his life, but mostly he concentrates on Congress and Public Option, which is why he falls in the top percentage of tweeting about “#HCR”. Thebighoot who came in 2^nd with status updates as well as 2^nd in the amount of tweets he has about “#HCR” however was very low on his following and followers contained a cloud of topics that ranged from one Republican Ideal to another rather than concentrating on this specific topic. He has such things as “anti-abortion” and “less gun-control” supporting the idea that he is a strong Republican. PublicOption4Us came in 3^rd with the number of tweets on the topic of “#HCR” not surprisingly by its name it did not range on the topic. He concentrated solely on Health Care Reform and encouraging people to get involved. BountyofBeads2 was 4^th in the number of tweets about the topic “#HCR” however when looking at his name on the website follerme.com it came up with very few topics that he has been trending lately and even less amount of topics regarding health care reform. He obviously had a short amount of time with several tweets about “#HCR”. Winterthur came in 5^th with the number tweets about “#HCR” when typing his name into follerme.com the cloud contained several topics all regarding health care reform. It seems as though he wrote about health care on many different topics rather than commenting on the specific one of “#HCR”. RobinGrantham included the most topics in his cloud; the majority of his topics were also regarding health care and congress. RobinGrantham looks as though he is someone who is thoroughly involved in the government and Twitter and does not concentrate on specific topics.

The above image is from the website mentionmap.com after typing in GlobalHybrid it shows the small amount of topics that he ranges around, but the large number of times he talks about the specific topics

The above image taken from the website mentionmap.com is the map of the tweets of thebighoot, although it might be hard to see there are not many topics that thebighoot talks about rather he is strong in only a few topics include “#HCR”

The above image is also taken from mentionmap.com, it is the map for PublicOption4Us, as you can see it ranges in a few more topics but still stays strong to all of those topics. Because this tweeter seems to be one who is concentrated on Health Care he spends most of his Tweets discussing all aspects of the topic.

The image above is the map of bountyofbeads2, as you can see the topics are much greater in quantity and not nearly as dark showing that he strays to several different topics and does not talk a lot about any of them

The map above is for Winterthur he also has several different topics with not very strong connections to any of them. He seems to be someone who talks about health care but not as something he concentrates on.

This mentionmap is from RobinGrantham and it includes the most amount of topics showing that “#HCR” was not one of his main priorities rather just a topic that he mentions in some of his tweets.

Health care is a very hot topic on Twitter right now as it is a current and important bill that many Americans have opinions about. The majority of people on Twitter discussing this are American citizens that either are in strong support of the bill or hate it completely. We gathered that many people using Twitter like to use the hash-tag if they want to be involved in the large stream of conversation going on, and seem a little more intelligent about their Tweets than people who do not use it. Many of the users state their opinion, but often it goes beyond just that as they direct their message towards someone or they include a hyperlink for people to check out. Twitter is an important tool when dealing with political topics because the service allows people to share their opinion among thousands of others without having to be heard by a news reporter or submit their opinion to other internet sites. It is a quick blurb that someone can send out, and by including #HCR in their message, their message is being viewed by anyone who is looking what people have to say about that topic.