How Social media reacted to the Chilcot Report

July 7 2016

By @G_Parsons33

Published in Analysis

After a 7-year inquiry, the Chilcot Report was finally published yesterday. The 6 thousand-page report gave a damning verdict of the legality of the Iraq War. The internet reacted explosively in the first few hours after the report’s release, with hundreds of thousands of people commenting via social media sites, blogs and forums.

As a social network perfectly suited to real-time commentary on live events and news sharing, Twitter played a substantial role in spreading the news of the Chilcot report. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets and most influential journalists and political figures commented on the Chilcot report via the platform.

We used the Visibrain media monitoring tool to take a look at the 800,000 tweets sent since yesterday, to find out how Twitter reacted to the results of the Chilcot inquiry.

The first hours of #Chilcot

Sir John Chilcot announced his findings in a press conference at 11 am yesterday, but online activity started building long before. Mention volumes grew steadily over the course of the morning as the first journalists were given early access to the report, with just a few hours to read it before its official release.

The number of posts spiked sharply as the press conference began and the report was released. At 11 am, volumes were averaging at 500 mentions per minute. Ten minutes into the press conference, that number had more than doubled to over 1,200 per minute. By 11.39 am, that number had doubled again, reaching 2,820 mentions per minute, the highest publication intensity of the day.

Volume spikes during the Chilcot press conference

Many journalists were live-tweeting the event – other news sites such as the Guardian used Facebook Live to broadcast the press conference, which has been viewed over 100,000 times:

Volumes have since been decreasing gradually, but remain impressive. In total, the Chilcot Report has racked up 784,831 mentions between the morning of July 6th and 12pm today, sent by 237,906 users, generating billions of potential impressions.

An overview of Twitter data for Chilcot

Interest in the Chilcot report has been international. While 60% of tweets came from the UK, 10% came from the United States, and a further 4% came from Australia.

The countries tweeting about the Chilcot report

Tony Blair comes under heavy fire on Twitter

The release of the Chilcot report was always going to be a difficult time for Tony Blair, but the inquiry turned out to be far worse for the former Prime Minister than many had expected.

Since the release of the report, Blair has been mentioned in over 244,000 tweets about the investigation.

The damage done to his already tenuous reputation is huge. The report, and the tweets about the information it reveals, are unequivocally damning:

To give an example of the extent of the damage: the most-retweeted post about Tony Blair is the one below, posted by @BBCBreaking. Shared over 3,000 times, it shows the interview of the sister of a serviceman killed in Iraq, in which she refers to Blair as “The World’s worst terrorist”:

In total, the interview has been shared over 7,800 times in various forms by different news outlets since the release of the report.

Blair himself released a statement on the Chilcot report via the @tonyblairoffice Twitter handle, but his response was shared comparatively less, with just under 600 retweets.

If we look closer at Twitter accounts that retweeted the post, we can see that it wasn’t picked up my any major news outlets, although a few prominent journalists did:

Twitter users that retweeted Tony Blir's Chilcot statement

The key influencers behind #Chilcot so far

So who was driving conversations around the Chilcot Report? As well as most national and international news outlets, some of the world’s most influential political figures and journalists spoke out in the aftermath of the Chilcot report.

The most retweeted influencers driving the conversation around Chilcot

Former leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas, Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon @NicolaSturgeon, Edward Snowden @Snowden and Harry Leslie Smith @Harryslaststand and prominent journalists such as Jon Snow @jonsnowC4 and Paul Mason @paulmasonnews were all in the top 20 most-retweeted Twitter users.

While not the most-retweeted, Jeremy Corbyn is among the most-mentioned users around the Chilcot report:

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the most mentioned politicians around Chilcot

The Labour leader has been widely praised both for his historical opposition to the Iraq War, and for his recent heartfelt speech in Parliament.

The extent of Twitter’s involvement and reaction to the Chilcot report is yet another example of the social network’s steady transformation into a news-centric site, destined to inform as much as entertain.

With over 6 million words to yet be read and deciphered, we can expect more details to arise from the Chilcot report in the days and weeks to come.

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Published in Analysis