This post is the first in a series analysing social data about the UK General Election 2015.

The third official debate has come and gone – this time without Cameron and Clegg. Perhaps this is why we saw the fewest tweets (179,000) collected during the debate compared to the previous two debate (216,000 & 312,000).

But how did the two leaders compare to those in the five opposition leaders who took part in the debate?

In the third part of my #SplunkTheVote series I took to Splunk to find out.

Analysis

4 key findings:

Twitter was still talking about Cameron. We collected 19,000 tweets mentioning his name despite his absence.

There was a big spike in negative sentiment for Farage when he branded the audience as “left-wing”.

Miliband had the highest overall sentiment from Twitter users with only 8% of tweets being negative.

Clegg faired paticulalary badly during this debate with the most negative tweets posted (26%).

The numbers

Ed Miliband (Labour) Tweets: 25,596 Overall Sentiment:Positive (92%)

Nigel Farage (UKIP) Tweets: 25,839 Overall Sentiment: Positive (86%)

Nicola Sturgeon (Scottish National Party) Tweets: 22,380 Overall Sentiment: Positive (88%)

Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru) Tweets: 4,446 Overall Sentiment: Positive (81%)

Natalie Bennett (Green) Tweets: 8,723 Overall Sentiment: Positive (87%)



David Cameron (Conservatives) – absent from debate Tweets: 18,781 Overall Sentiment: Positive (88%)

Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) – absent from debate Tweets: 5,221 Overall Sentiment:Positive (74%)



The data

If you want to build some cool stuff with this data, grab the data set here and let me know what you find.

I extracted this data from my Splunk instance with the following API request:

>curl -k -u admin:changeme https://0.0.0.0:8089/services/search/jobs/export --data-urlencode search="search index="ge2015" source="rest://twitter_hashtags" #bbcdebate earliest="04/16/2015:20:00:00" latest="04/16/2015:21:30:00" | fields _raw" -d "output_mode=csv" > 1604leadersdebatetweets.csv

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Thanks!

David Greenwood