During the month of November the Pirate movement grew with 63.957 followers on Facebook and 12.364 followers on twitter. This brings the total amount of people following a pirate party on Facebook or twitter to 661.852 people. 

The statistics were gathered on 5 December, which is one month and three days from the last analysis. The biggest increase in followers is because of a revision on the number of Pirate Parties that exist in the world  and an update on the statistics. The latest count is 22 registered + 23 active + 14 low activity = 59 parties world-wide (and an additional 3 parties claiming to be the official one in Serbia, Tunisia and Morocco). I prefer not making a judgement on legalities of parties here, this means that the conflicting parties are marked as “country 1/2” without significance in which party is counted first. This update on pirate parties worldwide has made me add or change 15 accounts and this sums up for the biggest change in followers for this month.

The ‘Pirate movement world map’ with basic info on each party will be released here on Pirate Times as soon as it is finalized (hopefully in two weeks time).

Facebook

The biggest change can be seen from the addition of 15 new Pirate Party Facebook accounts. The Romania (ACTA) account adds 49.676 followers and is an account that Romania used for protesting against ACTA but today keeps using to promote pirate ideas along with their other official account (1.214 followers). Germany keeps losing followers from the internal problems mentioned last time. Sweden is steady with a decrease of one follower over the past month (after their explosion of 30.000 followers during October). Catalonia gained a massive 4.301 followers from their election campaign. Brazil and Israel keeps adding a good number of followers. Iceland, which is our newest pirate party, already managed to gather up 834 followers.

Twitter

On twitter we see a similar change because of the additional 15 new twitter accounts to the list. The biggest one being the Chinese Pirate Party with 1.935 followers. Despite the drop of German followers on Facebook they keep going strong on Twitter adding another 991 followers.  Catalonia adds 969 followers after a successful election campaign which brought them a lot of attention. This attention seems to have rubbed off a bit on the Spanish Twitter account adding 332 followers there. Russia seems to be getting some attention adding 275 followers, most likely because of the upcoming censorship of Youtube and others sites in Russia. A significant drop (-368) can be seen on South Korea but this is the result of the party abandoning the old infrastructure and starting new Twitter, Facebook accounts and website instead of using their old resources (this change has most likely been there for some time but I only noticed it now). Switzerland got another two Twitter accounts on the list since they have chosen to separate their activity based on the three major languages present in their country (German, French, Italian).

FAQ

*Why only Facebook and Twitter? Why not Google+, vk.com or others? – Mostly because it’s hard to know what other social networks to include. Only doing Facebook and Twitter takes a lot of time, even though there are scripts to update followers. The same reasoning goes for federated services such as status.net as well since it’s hard to gather useful statistics for them.

*Can I have access to the .csv file you used for these stats? – Right now only if you have a very good reason and a specific purpose for them. I am working on updating contact information for different Pirate Parties. The plan is to make everything accessible in a good format with continuous updates. Giving out the information freely at this stage would only result in several versions of the document being in circulation where some are badly updated and faulty.

*Why is country X not included? – Probably because I didn’t know about it or considered their activity as dead. Send me a message or comment on this post and it will be included for next month

*Why is there “Countryname 1” and “Countryname 2” for some countries? – Because of internal struggles in that country with two pirate parties both claiming to be the official one. I would rather not waste my time on determining which is legitimate and which not and therefore I add both statistics until it is cleared up.

*Isn’t the follower/population very biased? – As all statistics numbers are biased in some way. Just measuring number of followers are biased to bigger countries. The follower/population obviously gives the initial country (Sweden) a bonus as well as countries sharing the same language. This is still an important alternative measurement since it shows relative impact of the social media account.

*Why did you not include local party X who is bigger than some countries here? – This is supposed to measure international impact. The reason Catalonia and Galicia are measured separately is that they are quasi-autonomous regions, independent from Spain.

About Josef Ohlsson Collentine

I’m a dual citizen (American/Swede) and try to integrate my reflections from a more global perspective if possible. I’m the organizational leader for Pirate Times and work actively to strengthen the pirate movement through this work as well as being the international contact for Piratpartiet (PPSE). Elected board member of PPSE for 2015-2018.
If you would like to ask me something I speak English, Swedish and Spanish. Find me on the links below

 

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During the month of November the Pirate movement grew with 63.957 followers on Facebook and 12.364 followers on twitter. This brings the total amount of people following a pirate party on…