Roy Murphy | Creative Director

Twitter is one of the most successful communication tools on the internet, but what type of people are actually using it? what are their political allegences and preferences? are those who tweet actually able to change anything?

A recent poll conducted by prospect magazine and complied by YouGov gives us a window into where the “twittering classes” as a group sit on the scale of liberal to authoritarian. My gut feel before looking at the stats would err toward the liberal but that’s likely to be coloured by my work within creative, media and technology.-Most of the savvy people within these groups are likely to be more digitally active if not politically and concious of broader social issues such as the environment, culture, the arts, education etc…

The poll found that Twitter users are less liberal than those who vote for the liberal democrats, but more so than either people aged 18-34 or Labour voters

We have already seen twitter users develop a groundswell of support for various issues and causes, through thousands of tweets, blogs and online protests; Iran, The Guardian / Trafigura gagging order. The homophobic rant regarding Stephen Gately in the Daily Mail etc…

These statistics could make interesting reading given that the parties contesting the UK general election in 2010 will rely heavily on the internet to spread their messages to the wider public. The general feeling up until now is that the conservatives and their supporters have been considered to lead the digital communication space. In contrast it is the left wing with a strongly liberal and civil libertarian bias that is leading the way.

To put the whole thing into perspective, one other stat from the research stands out – upto three quarters of the population don’t use twitter and don’t think it much use outside general chit chat and gossip. that is where the first digital battle lies, in changing attitudes toward how and when communication is spread and making people aware of the change in the balance of power. If we can get more people on board to understand the power of social networks as a force for dialogue and for change, then things could get interesting in May 2010

A hung parliament with Labour and the Liberal Democrats forming the next government anyone?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.