SMH, We See Your BS Pro-Lockout Sample Of 353 People & Raise You This

The Daily Telegraph ran with a similar angle today, quoting St Vincent‘s Dr Tony Sara, spokesman for the Last Drinks Coalition (a group of doctors, nurses, paramedics and police officers in support of the lockout laws) as saying:

Ah. Yup. There’s no data to back that up, either.

But online it’s a different story, with actual, legit data analysed by insights company Meltwater categorically showing the vast majority of conversations around lockout laws in the online sphere is negative – as in, people fkn hate them. 

Sure, it’s a safe bet to say that people against the lockout laws are more likely to jump online and make their voices heard than those in support of them, but the data around the hashtag #KeepSydneyOpen lends itself to an overwhelming majority being in favour of the movement, and thereby *against* lockouts.

Here’s a breakdown of the 3,217 conversations between the 10th February (when the #CasinoMike hashtag started trending) and the 22nd of February (today):

Of those #KeepSydneyOpen conversations:

• 712 or 22% were positive (green)
• 476 or 14% were negative (red)  (these posts were not negative to the cause, but rather contained negative words like ‘rant’, ‘fear’, ‘irony’, ‘punish’, word terms used to express their opinions regarding the lockout laws) 
• 2029 or 63% were neutral (blue)

Meltwater uses natural language processing to pick up certain words depending on what is being mentioned, which explains the huge number of neutral tweets, which can be loosely attributed to people talking about the conversation without sounding overly ‘positive’ – i.e. anyone tweeting about yesterday’s rally without going over the top.

For example, these:

I feel like the next step in the #keepsydneyopen campaign is for the Last Drinks body to meet with our suffering nightlife community.

— Nina Las Vegas (@ninalasvegas) February 21, 2016

Rad to see #KeepSydneyOpen trending first. Surely there are ways to stem violence without destroying a world city’s entire night economy.

— Benjamin Law (@mrbenjaminlaw) February 21, 2016

vs this:

bloody oath Sydney. this is amazing #keepsydneyopen pic.twitter.com/MWAuRHJe3z

— peking duk (@pekingduk) February 21, 2016

This data is in no way an absolute snapshot of the issue, but FFS, let’s take a step back before reporting things like “most of NSW is supportive of the lockout laws” w/o giving the whole story, mmmkay? 

P.S. Pls enjoy Friendlyjordies absolutely savaging Mike Baird over this lockout law sitch:

Source: SMH / Meltwater.