Tracking the new Egyptian President on Al Jazeera, the BBC and the Guardian
Today the Egyptian election commission announced Mohammed Morsi as the President of Egypt. Signalnoi.se was tracking the story across Al Jazeera English, the BBC and the Guardian websites and how it spread through Twitter and Facebook. I thought I’d share some of the charts that you’d see in the Signalnoi.se dashboard :
It is not unexpected that Al Jazeera English would see a tremendous gain with this story, especially as it was the de facto news source for the world over the 18 days of the Egyptian revolution leading to the ousting of former President Hosni Mubarak (disclosure : I was the Head of Online at Al Jazeera English until recently). Al Jazeera saw growth on Facebook, where their story was shared, liked and commented on over 11k times as of the writing of this post.
While the Al Jazeera English post dominated both the BBC and the Guardian on Facebook, the BBC did better than Al Jazeera English on Twitter - it had over 450 more tweets than the Al Jazeera English story. What is also interesting about the BBC story is that the number of likes and comments on Facebook track each other. Like for like, they’re getting the most discussion across the three news outlets.
Speaking of data and the elections, one of the most fascinating posts I read this evening was by Zeynep Tufekci titled the “Muslim Brotherhood Teaches a Lesson in Elections in the Age of Twitter and Google Spreadsheets”. She looks at how the Muslim Brotherhood used Twitter to constantly report data coming out of polling stations across Egypt and tabulated all the data in a Google doc in order to bring transparency to the process and thus limiting the ability of anyone to unfairly influence the outcome of the elections.
