Introduction

We aim to answer the following questions about current events:

      - Who is talking?
      - What are they talking about?
      - How are they talking about it?
We call this Public Attention.

To do this, we identified the elite sphere of Twitter (the journalists and politicians and influencers) by studying their social network patterns. We created 24 “flocks” and everyday, we summarize their tweets.

Among the 24 flocks, there are four different left-leaning flocks and four different right-leaning flocks, each flock is a different “flavor” of their larger partisan groups.

Then, there are flocks of experts, such as Middle East commentators, public health researchers, academic economists, and academic political scientists. And a handful of other flocks.

The first chart below describes how the activity level of each flock compares to its previous average. Scroll over the bars to find the flocks name. Look for flocks that are highly active or quiet. To learn more about what was happening that day, scroll down or click on the “Events” button to the left.

Each flock’s level of activity as compared with the previous days’ average (2021-09-28)

Top 5 most active flocks (based on p_score) and top words in their tweets (2021-09-28)

Finance Reporters:

[fed, debt, inflation, market, time, powell, year, today, people, energy, prices, uk, china, good, crisis, financial, back, bank, years, day]

Venture Capitalists & Entrepreneurs:

[people, time, amazon, today, good, make, work, facebook, years, great, love, company, data, year, team, thing, home, world, apple, lot]

Economists:

[people, work, good, policy, time, paper, research, data, make, economics, tax, great, years, read, health, today, economic, public, important, back]

National Political Journalists:

[trump, debt, biden, house, bill, vote, milley, senate, time, people, today, president, reconciliation, democrats, limit, infrastructure, republicans, back, afghanistan, ceiling]

#MAGA:

[biden, people, back, vaccine, trump, president, god, america, joe, milley, follow, afghanistan, border, good, time, americans, covid, government, patriots, state]

2021-09-28 events

Healthcare Workers Vaccine Mandate:

Budget Reconciliation Bill:

National Voter Registration Day:

Debt Ceiling Bill:

Senate Banking Committee Hearing: