Australian political observers will not need to be alerted to the fact that we have a new Prime Minister: Monday afternoon, former Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull unexpectedly challenged Prime Minister Tony Abbott for the leadership, and later that night won a party room ballot in a 54 to 44 decision. As with the previous leadership spills (from Rudd to Gillard in 2010, and from Gillard to Rudd in 2013), social media – and especially Twitter – once again played an important role in tracking this unfolding story across many different rumours and reports. Here’s how they did it.

For this analysis, we are drawing on a Twitter dataset tracking relevant hashtags such as #spill and #libspill; later in the afternoon, we also added a range of other hashtags and tracking terms as they appeared, as well as capturing @mentions of the accounts of Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Bill Shorten, and a number of other prominent frontbenchers.

First, given the continued growth of Twitter as a platform in Australia since the earlier spills, it is unsurprising that we saw considerably more user engagement with this event compared to earlier spills. While in 2010, the #spill hashtag peaked at just under 500 tweets per minute, the 2013 spill reached 1,100 tweets per minute – but in 2015, #libspill alone jumped to over 2,500 tweets per minute as the results of the party room ballot were announced. (Throughout the following analysis, we are focussing on the period from 2 p.m. to midnight on 14 September 2015.)

Continued via link.