Brexit: what does Social Media think today?

Alina Gorbatch
by Alina Gorbatch on April 23, 2019

Brexit has been happening for forever now. The attitude to it is changing, people become more and more anxious, express their feelings more passionately. The attitude of a nation to something as huge and emotional as Brexit is worth observing closely. And as an app that specializes in social media, we decided to focus on social media when analyzing people's attitudes.

Here's what we found after analyzing more than a million mentions of "Brexit" and more than 500.000 mentions of Theresa May (in a month!).

Brexit

Negativity is overwhelming when it comes to Brexit, but positive and neutral attitudes are strong, too. 

The freshest mentions about Brexit that reached the most people (filtered by Reach = more than 20,000 people) include:

Going through the tweets one by one is also rewarding.

For example, #Remain tweet: 

Full thread: https://twitter.com/CricketingMan/status/1120105044353921024

#Leave tweet:

Both, of course, didn't use any hashtags and can be found only with the "Brexit" keyword. 

Theresa May

The attitude to the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, is at its worst:

There are almost twice as many negative mentions as positive ones! The peak of negativity falls on March 29th - the day England was supposed to leave the EU.

Today, the freshest mentions include:

Negative Theresa May tweet:

Neutral Theresa May tweet:

Here're the respective topic clouds for "Brexit " and "Theresa May"

Let's now see how Brexit is discussed worldwide and internetwide, meaning what countries and what platforms talk the most about it. 

Countries 

First, from this, we can conclude that the whole world is talking about Brexit. Russian exclusion from the conversation is erroneous: the search was conducted in English and, therefore, only involved locations that use the Latin alphabet, while Russia uses Cyrillic. "Other" taking up such a large proportion of conversation also means that a significant percentage of the discussion around Brexit happens on Reddit - a website that doesn't allow location tracking and comes from people that don't disclose their location. This is not really surprising if you look at the number of subreddits dedicated to covering the topic: 

Sources

Here're the sources that are the most active when it comes to covering Brexit.

Twitter is on top, which is fair: it's the most politically-active platform and every major and minor news source has a Twitter account. By the way, this is how they rank in terms of influence and frequency of talking about Brexit. 

I also thought it would be interesting to see which news sites and blogs talk the most about Brexit. Here're the results: 

This is it on the relationship between social media and Brexit today.

Want to see how we analyzed Trump's Tweets using Awario? Jump to this post

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