Ask Obama

On Tuesday, July 5, President Obama had his first "Townhall" meeting on Twitter where anyone using the hashtag "#askobama" could ask the president a question. Tens of thousands of twitter users submitted over 100 thousand questions on a wide range of topics (charts here). Over 10 thousand tweets were retweeted by other users.

Beneath this collection of tweets is a retweet network where the most influential messages by the most influential users gets propagated across the network. For example the tweet:

Poker is not a crime. Do you support licensing and regulating online #poker? #askobama

was the most RTed tweet, with over 400 RTs. Other top tweets were about jobs, legalizing marijuana and the U.S. deficit. Of the users @mentioned and RT in other users tweets, these are the users that appeared most:

townhall, 8163,
barackobama, 2900
whitehouse, 2095
iowahawkblog, 1020
twitter, 773
reppaulryan, 624
uschamber, 513
jack, 477

This RT network can also be visualized. Shown below is the RT network of the 100 users that were RTed the most. Clearly, Barack Obama and the Townhall channels make up the center of this graph while other influencers surround them. The arrows indicate the direction of information as in A->B means A was RTed by B. Its interesting from this perspective that there is a hierarchy of RTs: some appear more like "sources" of information: "drewhampshire", "iowahawkblog" while others, with many arrows pointing in, appear as sinks: "ben_howe", "assignmentdesk1", "digiphile" and "anncensky". Surely the sinks are still some of the most RTed users, they are surely sources for other less important users down the line.