For my fourth method, I wanted to focus on who were the main influencers in the initially after the Ferguson incident. The date range I choose was from August 7, 2014 to August 31, 2014. I also applied filters to see what these influencers were specifically mentioning related to the keywords: Protestors OR Police OR Riots OR Discrimination. The total number of results with my analysis were 4002.
Looking at my results, I found that there were four main activists that seemed to have a huge influence during the first month of the shooting. The larger the circle the larger the metric and hence greater the influence. The most influential activist was Antonio French followed by Yamiche, Jelani9 and Jonswaine in the particular order after I applied the keywords and timeline.
The network map displayed the results and showed the connections between the main influencers to others. Interestingly, most of the tweets were descriptions of what activists were observing during the event and since Antoinio French was from the Furgason area he may have had a head start from other influencers while reporting the activities he saw. Some of these tweets include:
AntonioFrench
12 days after the shooting of #MIchaelBrown, the Ferguson police officer involved remains an enigma: http://t.co/I6QaK5ya21
And
AntonioFrench
peace restored police under captain johnson showed restraint so did protestors #Ferguson
Antonio French
His tweets also received the most retweets in general and seemed to engage well with others. One interesting observation I made was that Deray Mckesson was not a top influencer initially as we can see from the network web
The only form of user connections I noticed were these top influencers actively observing and reporting what they were witnessing to their followers which was later retweeted by many of their followers. This relates to the snowball effect in the article we read because the continuous retweets of the tweets not only enhance their influence but also makes a repetitive cycle of retweets.
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