Network graph of how news of the Westminster attack spread on Twitter.
To better understand how people use the social network in times of chaos, I sifted through a sample of 50,000 tweets sent out over a 30 minute time period. These tweets were sent just one hour after the attacker began his deadly drive across Westminster Bridge. Each color on the graphic represents a different community of tweets relating to the attack. A node can connect to two different colors, but is colored based on its original source tweet. The lines represent retweets of original tweets sent by one account.
A Sigma.js mockup of the graph can be found here.
Tools used for analysis:
- Python: for scraping Twitter
- Excel: for cleaning data
- Gephi: for creating network graph and running statistics
- Adobe Illustrator: for creating graphics