The News in New Media

Month: December 2022

Sen. Warnock Defeats Herschel Walker in Georgia Runoff

December 9, 2022

The 2022 midterm season is now complete. Here at the Social Media Listening Center we have been diligently following this election cycle and previously covered the Georgia midterms here. While midterms happened nearly a month ago, we were left without answers for the results of the Georgia senate race as neither candidate received the majority vote, and it was sent to a runoff election that would be held December 6th, 2022.  This left both Georgia and the country waiting with bated breath as this race would ultimately decide which party would hold the power in the senate.

As we discussed in our previous article on the Georgia elections, Georgia has seen a massive increase in voter turnout these past few election cycles – and this race was no different. The Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, said in a press release that there were “More Election Day votes cast in the 2022 runoff than on Election Day in the 2022 General Election, than on Election Day in the January 2021 runoff, or on the General Election Day in 2020”

The two candidates in the runoff election were incumbent Democratic Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. Senator Warnock maintains his seat in the senate earning 51.4% of the votes (1,816,096 votes). Herschel Walker received 48.6% of the votes (1,719,483 votes). Sen. Warnocks win gives democrats the 51st seat in the senate, thus giving the party true majority.

To understand the publics reactions to the runoff election, we used the keyword search to look up mentions of “Georgia Runoff” from December 5th to December 9th, as the election took place within that timeframe. The term has been mentioned 244.47k times in this period and reached 7.7 billion users. The overall sentiment of these posts was negative with 72.84% of posts being coded as such (30.3k posts) and 27.16% were coded as positive (11.2k posts). Overwhelmingly these conversations were taking place on Twitter and Reddit.

Users discussing the runoff elections were primarily male (64.72k mentions) and came from the United States (113.2k mentions). Top influencers were news sources such as, The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post. As well as political reporters such as, Rachel Maddow and Steve Kornacki.

Content under this search focused on disseminating who won the election:

 

But, other tweets focused on the history surrounding runoff elections in the state of Georgia. There are very few states who participate in runoff races. Only 10 states participate in runoffs during a primary election season, and only Georgia and Louisiana participate during midterm election cycles. In Georgia, this law was introduced in the 1960s by segregationist, Denmark Groover who famously pinned blame onto black voters for his losing his bid to reelection. Later, Groover admitted that that this system was put in place to suppress minority votes.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1600244884081807362?s=20&t=_t-L-qkKxfp0KAOL8PHbuA

While this election marks the close of the 2022 midterms, the SMLC at Clemson University will continue to monitor conversations and update you as necessary.

Author: Michelle Brazeau

FIFA World Cup Continues In Qatar

December 7, 2022

While this year’s staging of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar has earned quite a share of controversy both leading up to and during match play, the quarter-finals phase is about to begin with just eight national teams remaining.

A total of 32 countries had soccer teams qualify for the World Cup. These teams were broken down into eight groups of four for a round robin-style competition, after which the top two teams from each group would move onto a knockout stage. The first round of this knockout stage, the Round of 16, wrapped up yesterday, and the quarter-finals will begin on Friday, Dec. 9.

The two matches on Dec. 9 will be between Croatia and Brazil, and Netherlands and Argentina. Two more matches will take place the following day between Morocco and Portugal, and England and France. The United States’ men’s team surprised many by making it to the Round of 16 but ultimately were knocked out by the Netherlands, losing 3-1.

The group stage kicked off (pun intended) on Nov. 20 with a match between Ecuador and the home team, Qatar, with Ecuador winning 2-0. From that date through today, the combination of terms “World Cup” OR “FIFA” OR “Qatar 2022” have turned up a whopping 31.27 million mentions across social media and news networks. This is not surprising for such a large global event, especially when controversy has surrounded the choice of host nation since it was selected in 2010. In fact, the sheer volume of controversies have led to a single Wikipedia page with a laundry list of them all, ranging from human rights concerns and hundreds of deaths of migrant workers building the stadiums to more recent assaults on patrons following matches and incidents that have already taken place during matches, including fans storming the pitch and protests by the Iranian team.

However, nearly 64% of the mentions from Nov. 20 through today are positive. Many of the most-shared posts within this positive segment are about individual or team performances, such as players from league clubs putting up strong numbers for their countries. Accounts for many teams and global or national news sources have also shared updates and positive information about their nation’s performances or impressive stories.

There have even been some heartwarming stories that have moved beyond the soccer world, such as Japan’s considerate treatment of their locker room after an upset victory, when many other teams would have trashed the room in celebration:

Additionally, many teams have used their global platform as an opportunity for activism. The Moroccan team, which is the first African team to make the quarter-finals since 2010, waved a Palestinian flag after their upset win over Spain yesterday:

Iranian fans have also protested in favor of women’s rights, following strict and violent backlash in Iran against pro-women’s rights protestors. A pitch invader also supported women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and Ukraine all in one go, in a much-praised highly visible stance:

Since this is a global event at its core, it’s not surprising to see that nearly every nation has chimed in with either social media or traditional news about the World Cup. The United States leads the way with 2.3 million mentions, while the United Kingdom, Japan, Nigeria, and India round out the top-five countries with the most discussion of the World Cup. The U.K. is the only one of these countries to still have a team in the running, with England reaching the quarter-finals.

Star players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappé are top trending themes within this massive volume of content, as well as K-Pop star Jung Kook who performed in the opening ceremony. With so many people chiming in from so many regions of the world, social discussion of the World Cup is, much like the event itself, never dull.

Author: Kayleigh Jackson

College Football Playoff Bracket is Released

December 5, 2022

This college football season has been filled with many easy wins, upsetting losses, and, unfortunately, injuries among the players. Taking all these factors into consideration, the college football committee carefully reviews each team and its ranking to determine who the final four college teams are that will compete for the national championship.

However, many individuals have gone to Twitter to express their opinion on the committee as being unfair, biased, and playing favorites based on previous years, not based on the current standings of each team.

Using Sprinklr Analytics, the platform identified over a 12 million reach with 2,000 mentions. The sentiment regarding this analysis was 69.88% positive mentions and 30.12% negative mentions. Out of the mentions, the analysis platform analyzed that 80% of the content was from male users’ accounts.

Many users are happy to see that both power teams, Alabama and Clemson, have been left out of the selection process this year, but on the other hand, some passionate fans of the schools are upset that their team did not make the cut.

Texas Christian University (TCU) has been a trending topic as well because they are not one of the few teams that are consistently in the top four selected, and thus their 2022 record had to speak volumes in order to finalize their spot.

The rest of the line-up includes Georgia, Michigan, and Ohio State. These games will be played at the end of December and will determine who the 2022 national champion team will be.

On the bright side, the Clemson team will take on Tenessee in the Orange Bowl for the bragging rights of who wears the better orange!



Author: Louisa Glazunova

2022 Spotify Wrapped Released

December 2, 2022

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – Spotify Wrapped season. Spotify Wrapped is one of the most highly anticipated roll outs of the year for its users. Beginning in 2016, Spotify has taken users listening data to provide them with a most-listened to list. The concept has evolved into giving users individualized playslists and shareable content.  Not only does Spotify wrapped give users their personal most-listened to songs, it also provides users with lists of the most-streamed artists and songs globally.

According to Spotify, the most streamed artists globally in 2022 were:

  1. Bad Bunny
  2. Taylor Swift
  3. Drake
  4. The Weeknd
  5. BTS

The most streamed songs globally in 2022 were:

  1. As It Was – Harry Styles
  2. Heat Waves – Glass Animals
  3. STAY (with Justin Bieber) – The Kid LAROI, Justin Bieber
  4. Me Porto Bonito – Bad Bunny
  5. Tití Me Preguntó – Bad Bunny

Now that we now what people were listening to this year, we took to Sprinklr to see what people were saying about their streams. The term “Spotify Wrapped” was mentioned 1.78 million times from November 29th to December 2nd. This term reached over 4.89 billion users. The sentiments of these posts were overall negative, with a sentiment score of 67.74% negative (445.2k mentions). These posts reached a volume height of 959,850 mentions on November 30th (the day Wrapped was released). Top themes included Last Year and Next Year as people reflected on results from years past and predicted those to come. Top hashtags included #spotifywrapped and #spotifycorrupt.

Users discussing Spotify Wrapped were predominantly females (798k mentions) in the United States (190,821 mentions). Top influencers include news sources like The New York Times and CNN. Other influencers include other entertainment sources like Billboard and Netflix.

Referring back to #spotifycorrupt, it seems that fans of the popular K-POP group, BTS, are outraged that Spotify has not included the group in some of their rankings.

This story seems to be developing as users have mentioned Spotify has taken steps to rectify this issue.

https://twitter.com/zonequal/status/1598391380673437696?s=20&t=whGyxEXMPiZ0bhY16jhwXw

Overall, the conversations surrounding Spotify Wrapped ranged from individuals sharing their top five to joking about what their lists mean. This year’s Spotify Wrapped included a section that gave you a horoscope-like description of what your listening habits mean. This inspired people to make parodies and even sparked an investigation into the brains behind this project by The New York Times.

Other content surrounding Spotify Wrapped included users sharing their more interesting results. Like this user who listened to “Mice Repel” by Ultrasonic Pet Repellent, 292 times this year.

Most users ended up sharing how they were unsurprised by their results and could easily predict what other people listened to as well.

It is always a fun time of year to reflect on our listening habits. While we won’t be sharing our top 5 songs of the year, we will continue to monitor these conversations at The Social Media Listening Center at Clemson University.

Author: Michelle Brazeau