Pirate Parties on Facebook and Twitter – September 2012 | PirateTimes
The Pirate Movement on Facebook and Twitter – September 2012
The pirate movement has grown with 7 138 followers on Facebook and 5 315 followers on Twitter. The aggregated amount of new followers is 12 453 during the last month. To see the statistics from last month you can look here, these figures are from September 18th (1 month and 3 days after the last report). Last month there was an error in the calculation of Facebook fans for Latvia (3587) the correct amount should be 450 fans. This is why you can see a significant drop for Latvia in this months’ statistics and the number calculations are a bit odd.
This report about Facebook and Twitter followers is a recurring statistical analysis which will become more interesting once I have more history to compare with. This month I added the population of countries and the followers per inhabitant written in scientific notation (e.g. 5.15E-03 = 0.00515 followers / inhabitant in the country). For now you will have to do with the following screenshots of the data. But in the future I aim to make the raw data available to whoever would like to dig deeper into it.
Facebook
The most significant change can be seen in the 1 425 new followers that Netherlands managed to gather. This coincided with their election and campaigning. As we wrote earlier they did not get a seat but the future is looking bright. The top countries seem to be steadily adding followers, apart from Sweden who might have spammed away some of their followers by sending out up to six updates in a single day (mostly three to four updates per day), another reason for the drop might have been the controversial blog post that Rick Falkvinge had on his blog.
The Czech Republic have regional elections coming up for October 12-13 and we will hopefully see a significant jump in their followers in the next month. Considering their per capita followers they seem to be doing very good. In Israel a new pirate party started and seems to be gaining a good amount of new followers as well. Looking at followers per capita we see that Sweden is still first by far despite being one of few countries losing followers this month. They are followed by the Czech Republic and Luxembourg. The significant drop of followers by Latvia, as mentioned above, is not a real drop but a correction according the completely wrong amount of followers reported for last month. The other significant loss is by Poland who seems to have got their fan page deleted.
Twitter
Germany keeps amassing followers and is far ahead of any other country. They also have a second place as counted per capita. The leader, when counted per capita followers, is Luxembourg who has a small population of 511 800 citizens according to Wikipedia. In third place we see Catalunya. The only major difference from last month is the Netherlands who gained 1 186 new followers because of their national election.
*Why only Facebook and Twitter and 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 as well, 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. And on top of that Google announces that they will end this service in November 2013. http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664197
*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 set purpose with 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 cause several versions of the document being around where some were badly updated.
Featured image is CC BY Anton Nordenfur.
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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19 Responses
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Where is Google+, that network has 100M monthly users so that should be included. I think. ; )
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@Henry, from the article:
“Why only Facebook and Twitter and 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 as well, even though there are scripts to update followers.”
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Ok. In my world G+ is closer to FB and Twitter than any other social network. I think any other global social network is by far smaller.
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one reason I don’t include it is not using it actively myself. Might add it to stats if you could show me a good script to scrape the followers from there though. No time to do the search myself though
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@Henry, from the article:
“Why only Facebook and Twitter and 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 as well, even though there are scripts to update followers.”
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Isn’t it a bit problematic comparing followers to the population when people from all over the world can choose to follow any country’s Pirate Party? I follow the Swedish and German Pirate Party even though I live in Norway.
Apart from that I find this statistic interesting. There is also an initiative to start a Pirate Party in Norway. Here are their Twitter and Facebook:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PiratPost
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/126296200695/-
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problematic is in the eye of the beholder. In a global world we have many international friends which means info might come from outside country as well.
The following of other countries definitely benefits a few selected ones but it also gives them more importance by increasing their share of voice in the pirate community.
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@Jon Peder It’s true that there are international followers. But if you calculate the ratio only to rank them, it won’t make much of a difference, because they all have them (internationals should cancel each other out in the ranking). Maybe there’s a slight bias toward PPSE and PPDE, as “the original” and “the biggest” ones. Just a wild guess, I suspect higher international interest for those, and you coincidentally fit that picture
The Norwegian Pirates are on our radar
We even had an article by Anton about Piratpartiet Norge not too long ago: http://piratetimes.net/introduction-of-the-norwegian-pirate-party/
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@paul I guess there’s a bunch of pirates following almost every pirate party around, for simpathy, for sharing language or for being PP-SE or PP-DE.
I.e. it’s common for all latin-american+Spain to follow each others, as it might happen with BE/NL/FR, German followers of PP-CH/AT, and so on.
For that reason it is possible that countries with a small population can get their % more altered than bigger ones.
I.e. Luxembourg is #1 in twitter/capita and Estonia #2. It might be interesting to gather public information of PP’s followers to determine the % of followers within its territory, that is the “definitive” measure, but it’s far more complicated to achieve.
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I consider the followers-to-population ratio very interesting. It shows us, to one degree, how much fame the party has garnered compared to the size of their country. Some countries, including Sweden, has parties that are extremely famous both nationally and internationally even though they have a relatively small population.
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There’s some mistakes in the Twitter spreadsheet, population column. I don’t know if the average followers / country are affected as well.
I.e. Population of the Netherlands might be around 16M, not 10M, and there’s a hole in row 40, Galicia, and all the populations from 41 to 49 are misplaced at least 1 row down or simply wrong. Population of Ireland appears to be 47M and Venezuela 5M…
However, thank you for all this data!
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great! thanks for pointing that out. Will adjust for next time
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[…] The pirate movement has grown with 3 980 followers on Facebook and 5 315 followers on Twitter. Total new followers 9 160. […]
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Thanks for the data!
However in the second (twitter) graphic the population of Greece is mentioned as 38mil. The correct number is in the first graphic (FB)
Please correct the data
Thanks!-
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thanks. Will fix for next time. Too much work and too little time to correct it now
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[…] Även om jag inte är såpass aktiv i dagsläget, är denna en mycket rolig nyhet och kan redan nu avslöja att Sverige ligger högt i tabellerna som man själv kan bläddra igenom http://piratetimes.net/the-pirate-movement-on-facebook-and-twitter-september-2012/. […]
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[…] PPGR members, about 1100 today, cover a wide spectrum of many political and ideological spheres. In statistics published by Pirate Times, PPGR is in the 10th place on Twitter out of 49 PP. PPGR is 20th on Facebook out of 53 in August, and is 11th out of 54 on Twitter and 21 out of 55 on Facebook on September. […]
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[…] internal struggles currently present inside the party, the have been decreasing every month from September last year. The Romanian ACTA group keeps losing relevance and thereby followers as […]
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I think you miss some new followers in Pirata.GAL and Pirata.CAT (264 and 5026 respectively right now :P)
I suppose that you only take into account the oficial members from the PPI, because you could add ‘Piratas de Madrid’ (Pirata.MAD – @PiratasMadrid) to your lists. It is the new officialy registered political party in Spain.
BTW, well done ? It is a pleasure to see that the amount of adepts grow every month.