#PanamaPapers: the impact of the crisis so far
April 7 2016UPDATE: Our full, in-depth study of the Panama Papers is now available for download.
The #PanamaPapers scandal has been taking over our newsfeeds this week. Dubbed the biggest leak in the history of data journalism, the crisis has put the financial affairs of the world’s most rich and powerful under scrutiny.
Panama Papers has been raging since Sunday, and for those involved it certainly looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. We used the Visibrain media monitoring platform to take a look at some of the key data showing the online impact of the crisis so far.
4 million tweets and counting
There have been 4,348,443 tweets about Panama Papers so far, between April 3rd and April 7th, and the tweets are still pouring in:
The influencers
Some of the world’s most influential journalists and political figures have spoken out in the wake of the scandal.
Can we just remind ourselves that the #PanamaPapers are from just ONE law firm, in just ONE tax haven. Tip of the proverbial iceberg.
— Bobby Ghosh (@ghoshworld) April 3, 2016
I opposed the Panama Trade Agreement because, as the Panama Papers show, it helped the rich evade US taxes.https://t.co/6JLHgIrb3J
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 5, 2016
So a big chunk of the world's political + economic elite are secretly stashing away wealth while imposing cuts on everyone else #panamaleaks
— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) April 3, 2016
Edward Snowden was by far the Twitter user with the most impact. The top three most-retweeted posts of the crisis are all from the @Snowden Twitter handle:
He is also the top influencer in terms of the total number of retweets: all in all, @Snowden’s tweets have been shared 80,199 times since April 3rd.
The hashtags
The #PanamaPapers dedicated hashtag has been used 2,937,833 times since the start of the crisis. The #PanamaLeaks hashtag is not as popular, and has only been used 382,211 times:
The press
Unsurprisingly, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the newspaper behind the leaks got the most shares: the link to its Panama Papers website has been tweeted 36,518 times since news of the scandal broke online. Its article giving details of the leak comes in second place at 26,453 shares.
Articles posted by the ICIJ and The Guardian come in third and fourth place.
If you would like to read our full, in-depth study of the online impact of #PanamaLeaks, you can download it here.
Subscribe to the newsletter
Stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter and receive media monitoring best practices, social data trends & exclusive case studies: