Yes, its yet another poll about twitter

In the new edition of Prospect—in shops tomorrow, but on subscribers’ doormats today—we have a new poll as part of a fun feature about the politics of Twitter. The claim is that Twitter is an oddly liberal tool: a mouthpiece for what we have (not entirely originally, I must admit) dubbed the “twittering classes.”  The killer bit of the poll is where Twitterers lie on our scale of liberal/authoritarian groups—way out to the extreme, see the graphic below. It also has some lighthearted stuff about Twittering figures from history too—more on that later tomorrow. You can find it on page 37 of the print edition, inside Evgeny’s wonderful piece on dictators and the web.

We’ll put all this up on the web soon, along with responses to Evgeny’s thesis from Clay Shirky and others. But given the Guardian and Telegraph did stories on our Twitter poll today I thought I’d just put up the text of press release for people to see. Obviously we’d be grateful if you could tweet this, mentioning @prospect_uk when you do so!

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PROSPECT PRESS RELEASE: NEW TWITTER POLL

Often seen as little more than a harmless waste of time, the much-hyped online social network site Twitter is increasingly being used as a tool by liberal and left-wing political campaigners. Twitter users are among the most liberal groups in Britain, a new national poll of 2000+ people by Prospect magazine and pollsters YouGov reveals.

The poll tested Britain’s 5.5m Twitter users and compared them to the rest of the country — revealing that British Twitterers actually have a strongly liberal and civil libertarian bias. This is in contrast to the popular view that David Cameron’s Conservatives and their blogging supporters are the most adept online force in politics.

The poll shows that while 57 per cent of Britons think greater police powers to tackle terrorism are more important than protecting civil liberties, less than half of Twitter users agree. Fifty-six per cent of the public agree that “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men,” compared to only 45 per cent of Twitter users.

Prospect and YouGov created a new scale to rate the “most liberal groups in Britain” — and found that, on a relative scale constructed from our poll data (see the attached graphic) Twitter users were the third most liberal group—just behind Liberal Democrat voters, but significantly more liberal than either average Labour voters, or 16-34 year olds.

The poll results confirm a series of recent stories, in which left-wing campaign groups and Twitter users have begun to use the site to campaign for liberal causes. The Twittering classes have shown liberal inclinations in the last recent months by:

Breaking the Guardian’s court injunction banning them from naming mining company Trafigura.

Attacking Daily Mail writer Jan Moir for “homophobic” remarks on the death of gay pop star Stephen Gately.

Criticising Sunday Times critic AA Gill for shooting a baboon while on safari.

Vilifying Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan and his criticism of the NHS in the US, in the #welovethenhs campaign.

Reacting to the poll, Prospect managing editor James Crabtree said: “New technologies are often adopted by the political extremes of left and right. It is clear that the urban, metropolitan, Guardian-reading ‘chattering classes’ have flocked online to become the ‘twittering classes’ —and they are now a real force in British politics.”

The survey confirms Twitter’s image in Britain as a tool for a youthful metropolitan elite. 46 per cent of users are younger than 35, compared to 29 per cent of the population, while Twitter users more likely to live in London.

But where Twitter users and the rest of the country most disagree, perhaps unsurprisingly, is over the service itself. Twitter users might think the service is worthwhile, but 76 per cent of the British population give the idea a thumbs-down, saying they have never used it and do not intend to in future—meaning the “twittering classes” could have a Twitter monopoly for some time to come.