Gordon Brown's Moment of Truth: How Bad is #Bigotgate?
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, April 28 2010
Social media reflect the intensity of conversation around current events. So, how much is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's comment, caught on tape, that an older Labour supporter named Gillian Duffy who he had an extended conversation with on the street was a "bigoted woman", reverberating online?
Trendistic, which tracks word frequency on Twitter, shows that Brown's gaffe has been getting a lot of attention--a little less than half the mentions that the British PM candidates got last week around their second TV debate. That can't be good for him.
Likewise, a streamgraph looking at the last 1000 tweets using the tag #ge2010 (General Election 2010), also shows a lot of conversation about Brown, and what some are calling #bigotgate. And that's a graph made from comments drawn from what is roughly the middle of the night in England.
P.S. While much of the political class mull whether this is the final nail in Brown's political coffin, read this powerful personal response from an Eastern European immigrant in Britain who is angry at how few people have stood up in defense of Brown's visceral response to Duffy's anti-immigrant animus.