Scotland’s independence referendum: Tallying the social media vote
As voters in Scotland went to the polls on Thursday to cast their ballots in the country’s historic independence referendum, they also spoke out on social media.
Twitter said Thursday that there had been more than 7 million tweets about the referendum since Aug. 5, the day of the first televised debate on whether Scotland should leave Britain. The hashtag #IndyRef was used 3.75 million times, more than any other general hashtag, Twitter said. More than 500,000 of those tweets came in the last day, and 1.8 million were in the last week, according to the social analytics firm Topsy.
Twitter noted that hashtags indicating support for a "yes" vote have been used 1.55 million times, while those indicating a "no" vote have showed up 500,000 times since Aug. 5. That is very different from the results of opinion polls, which showed the two sides running neck and neck going into the vote.
Some users didn’t have to write a Facebook post or a tweet to make their opinions known – they changed their profile photos to include “yes” or “no” logos, so every update is peppered with their preference.
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