The weekend has a funny way of slowing social media.
It’s not as if news doesn’t happen on Saturday or Sunday — this weekend saw the dramatic conclusion of Egypt’s hotly contested presidential election — but the kinds of workaday, event-specific incidents that often drive our reporting project here at News21 definitely die down when the clock hits 5 on Friday afternoons.
A great example of this is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s controversial press conference Friday, when she accused the House Republicans’ vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt as proof of the party’s support of voter suppression.
The press conference pushed mentions of voter suppression on Twitter well above its traditionally low market share — as mentioned in our Friday blog post — but the term is back to its low numbers this morning.
Did the weekend defuse the anger of conservative Twitter users, thereby diluting the comments’ shelf life in the media buzz cycle?
We’ll keep you posted on those trends throughout the week. In other news, our reporters @MichaelCiaglo, @CFStraumsheim and @AndreaRumbaugh will be traveling to Tennessee and Florida to report on restoring voting rights for felons in each state. Be sure to follow them for updates and on the ground reporting.
What We’ve Been Reading
“Few Iowa Felons Pursue Voting Rights,” (Ryan J. Foley, 06/24, AP)
“State was warned that voter purge was based on bad data,” (Kathleen Haughney, 06/22, South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
“Voter ID Cases Unlikely to be Decided by Election Day,” (Ann-Elise Henzi, 06/25, WUWM)
“Voting Problems During the Wisconsin Recall Election — A Preview of November,” (Dara Lindebaum, 06/22, American Constitution Society for Law and Policy)
“Pelosi: Contempt, voter suppression linked,” (06/21, UPI)
“Suddenly, elections supervisor becomes a tempting job,” (Jeremy Wallace, 06/21, Sarasota-Manistee Herald-Tribune)
Twitter Trends
As we wrote, the weekend is usually a damper on social media activity surrounding our key search terms. This weekend was no different, although a mention of voter ID on ABC’s “This Week” political roundtable Sunday has garnered buzz among conservative Twitter users. Several conservative blogs have used video of Washington Post columnist George Will “taking down” Democratic Party strategist Hillary Rosen’s concern over alleged voter suppression efforts by the Republican Party.
Videos like this are sure to get heavy play on social media networks; they are short, quote-heavy examples of a controversial issue.
In general, we’re seeing a broad stabilization across our four key search terms (voting rights, voter ID, voter fraud and voter suppression) on social media search engine Topsy.com
It’d be easy to say that we’ve reached a pre-election lull, but all we need is another buzz-happy story to shoot social media activity up.
We’ll be the first to tell you when that happens. Follow @WhoCanVote for the latest links, news and trends in voting rights news.