I am collecting data about the #2a hashtag and how it relates to the second amendment and recent political events while breaking down opinions into location, age, and gender.
By researching and collecting data on the hashtag #2a, I hope to study the differing opinions of the second amendment and how it relates to gender, age, and location. By collecting and sorting this data, I hope to create a visual representation and how it adapts to recent changes made by President Trump. There was a recent bill signed relating to “Constitutional Carry” thus the opinions of many people are in a state of flux, so it will be interesting to see the changing views of people relating to where they are and how old they are.
My first expectation from this hashtag was to see many people arguing over whether the second amendment was constitutional or not, yet this hashtag had a more political side to it. There were a lot of retweets from @NRA talking about the recent nomination of the supreme court justice and to allow Senator Sessions to become the Attorney General. While these two topics dominated most of the discussion, there were topics relating to police shootings and people asking questions relating to certain states laws about open carry. This hashtag is much more political than I expected and will continue to be interesting and relevant as long as it has ties to recent politics and President Trump. I noticed a lot of #Trump and #America in a lot of these tweets, creating an interesting connection.
While searching for my hashtag on google news and limiting results to the past week, I received no news about my hashtag relating to my topic, most of the news was talking about either baseball or division 2a in high school sports. However, when I searched my topic “Second Amendment” with the same limitation, I received 15,000 results in less than a second. I chose two articles, one from Fox Business and the other from National Review. Both articles highlighted the recent nomination to the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, and how he will relate to the second amendment. The hashtag topic was more on point than the hashtag itself because the hashtag is an abbreviation of the actual topic and most news sources will use the full name rather than a twitter abbreviation. I am a bit surprised there were no #2a tags on the news pages relating to this topic.
When changing my search parameters to 2006, the main talking point about the second amendment was talking about how presidential candidates Bush and Kerry were both hunters, and when Vice-President Cheney had an unfortunate hunting accident. This was not too surprising to be reading about hunting from a republican president, yet the hunting accident did spark some talk about gun control. These past search results do not particularly change my view on my data.
With the data collected, I feel like I am collecting live data since it is people’s opinions across the nation about a particular topic. Instead of having the information boiled down and filtered by a mainstream media company, I get to see the raw opinionated data and analyze the real facts and opinions from people. Data scraping is becoming a more prominent way of gathering data, and the article by Marres and Welteverde talks about the increasing use of this technique, “To put this differently, the rising popularity of scraping is closely connected with the rise of the so-called ‘real-time Web”(1). The tweets collected tell a shared, but more in depth story from the two current articles collected. The tweets were people’s own opinion of the Supreme Court nominee, while the news articles only discussed who the nominee was and his background. The tweets contain more data, however, good and usable can be more difficult to find. It will be easier to determine which source provides better data after collecting more tweets over the next couple of months.
Citations:
“Trump’s Supreme Court Front-Runners on Guns, Immigration & Healthcare.” Fox Business. Accessed February 01, 2017. http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/01/31/trump-s-supreme-court-front-runners-on-guns-immigration-healthcare.html.
“What Justice Gorsuch Might Mean for the Second Amendment.” National Review. February 02, 2017. Accessed February 03, 2017. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444480/neil-gorsuch-united-states-supreme-court-second-amendment-police-seizure-gun.
Maloy, Simon. “Bush “likes to hunt quail”; Cheney “loves to hunt” — but Kerry “spent time posing with guns”.” Mediamatters.org. February 14, 2006. http://mediamatters.org/research/2006/02/14/cnns-morton-bush-likes-to-hunt-quail-cheney-lov/134880.
Http://www.facebook.com/pages/Aboutcom-Civil-Liberties/213420115372527. “Does the 2nd Amendment Protect the Individual Right to Bear Arms?” About.com News & Issues. March 6, 2006. Accessed February 03, 2017. http://civilliberty.about.com/od/guncontrol/i/2ndamendment_2.htm.
Marres, Noortje, and Esther Weltevrede. 2013. “Scraping the Social?” Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (3): 313-315.
Great post Harrison, I appreciate this demonstration of your intellect. I liked the idea you had about tweets being “raw opinionated” data that has yet to be ‘filtered’ by mainstream media. Outside of social networking sites, it is very rare for us to see the opinions of our fellow countrymen and women. So much of what we see on TV has a clear bias and agenda, so it is cool to be able to see what the ‘people’ are saying about a certain topic. I’m curious to know if you noticed more tweets that were for or against the second amendment and what the general feeling towards this hashtag was (positive or negative tweets). The insights of this post have lead me to realize that many formerly hot topics are now becoming politically charged and there is rising political unrest in the country. The great divide is expanding, and I hope we don’t get swallowed in its gaping void.
I expected that you would find tweets and news articles using the hashtag #2a that did not refer to the Second Amendment because when I read your article title, I actually couldn’t think of what #2a actually was until I read further into your post. I am not surprised that most of tweets using #2a were generated by the @NRA. Since according to our readings in class, most Twitter users are young people who live in cities, I suspected that there would be only one or two Twitter accounts – grassroots organizations or lobbyists – that would try to continuously use #2a to gain traction on the issue because the issue of #2a isn’t something that young people think about all of the time. Also, your data (most tweets came from @NRA and included #America) also reflects that #2a is more of a national issue and less of a local and even, international one.
Did you try to look at the Twitter profiles of individuals who used #2a and see where they lived, their gender, and age range? As a young person who lives in the city and does not own a gun, I always suspected that #2a was not an issue that affected my life on a daily, monthly, or even yearly basis, but I do wonder who would be impassioned by the subject and why. Did you also search for news articles on the argument for gun control after mass shootings or terrorist attacks? Analyzing the issue of the second amendment during times of national crisis and mourning would give you insight on how your Twitter data may change or evolve if such a crisis happens this semester.
Your data showcased that there are national organizations (such as the NRA) that can heavily influence Twitter which is different from my data where most accounts that tweeted #nobannowall were mostly individuals who wanted to share their personal sentiments. It also helped me reflect on how an issue that I did not think much about can still have an ongoing presence on Twitter.