Roughly 25% of all Gamergate activity is coming from accounts created in the last two months.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting these accounts are bots or sockpuppets — one person controlling multiple accounts — but simply that these accounts are new to Twitter.

As Gamergate supporters were quick to point out, many of them joined Twitter simply because that’s where the debate was. Some created anonymous accounts to avoid being tracked and identified, while others joined only after being turned away from other forums.

Is this distribution unusual, though? For contrast, I tried another hashtag for a similar length of time, the #kashmirfloods hashtag used during last month’s tragic floods that ravaged northern India. The distribution is much closer to what you’d expect: evenly distributed, roughly following Twitter’s rise in popularity.

The Retweet Network

As you’d expect, there are two large communities contributing to the #Gamergate hashtag, and who they choose to follow and retweet are very, very different with little overlap.

There’s little overlap between communities.

For example, in this three day period, 1,673 users retweeted Anita Sarkeesian, while 2,240 users retweeted Blocker (aka Mr. Fart), one of the most prolific Gamergate tweeters. (Yes, the most retweeted person in #Gamergate is named “Mr. Fart.”) But only 79 users retweeted messages from both accounts.

Contrast that with the 1,138 users that retweeted messages from both Blocker and Gamergate proponent Milo Yiannopoulos in the same time period.

The top RTed users are pro-GG, the top RTed tweets are against.

The list of most retweeted users is dominated by Gamergate proponents, with only a couple critics in the top 20. Former NFL player and gamer Chris Kluwe pops up in #2 after a string of popular anti-Gamergate rants, but even Anita Sarkeesian only appears in 15th place.

The most retweeted tweets, however, look very different. The top 10 is entirely Gamergate critics and satire, with only five pro-Gamergate tweets in the top 20.

Why would that be? One obvious reason is the sheer number of #gamergate-tagged tweets being posted by supporters, while critics tend to post far fewer, possibly to avoid getting sea lioned.

Gamergate supporters use the #gamergate hashtag more often.

For example, the top five most-retweeted Gamergate critics collectively had 87 of their #gamergate-tagged tweets retweeted within the three day period. The top five Gamergate proponents had 811 tweets, nearly ten times as many.

Averaging Gamergate

We can use retweet behavior as a rough proxy to group like-minded individuals together. As we’ve established, those who retweet Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn tend to fall in the opposing camp of those who retweet Milo Yiannopoulos, Internet Aristocrat, or Christina H. Sommers.

I grouped together the 3,022 accounts who retweeted Milo Yiannopoulos, Internet Aristocrat, or Christina H. Sommers, and the 1,694 who retweeted Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn. With that, we can draw some rough demographics for Twitter usage.

The median Gamergate supporter has 67 followers, follows 134 accounts, has posted 1,194 tweets, and joined Twitter a little over two years ago.

The median Gamergate critic has 144 followers, follows 234 accounts, has posted 3,765 tweets, and joined Twitter four years and three months ago.

Naturally, this is skewed by the large population of relatively newly-created Gamergate accounts.

Gauging Sentiment

On Saturday, Newsweek partnered with a social media monitoring firm called Brandwatch to publish their own analysis of the Gamergate hashtag using half a million tweets sampled from September 1.

They ran sentiment analysis on tweets directed to several prominent Gamergate critics, and found across the board that around 90% of the tweets were “neutral.”

Newsweek interpreted this to mean the tweets were neither positive or negative, but I’m fairly sure Brandwatch simply meant they couldn’t make an automated determination for 90% of tweets — sentiment analysis using less than 140 characters can be challenging.

Newsweek’s sentiment analysis. Nope.

Digging into the actual text by hand, it’s clear that these tweets are anything but neutral.

In my three-day sample, there were 1,171 tweets that mentioned Anita Sarkeesian’s Twitter username, 485 for Brianna Wu, and 338 for Zoe Quinn. I put the text of all of those tweets, without user information, in this spreadsheet so you can see for yourself.

Roughly 90–95% take a clear side either in favor or against Gamergate.

A quick manual classification of a sample shows the numbers to be closer to 75% negative, 15% positive, and 10% neutral or undetermined, very far from Newsweek’s automated attempt. I’ve reached out to them to see if they’ll publish a clarification about renaming “neutral” to “undetermined.”

Update: Mike Williams, a data scientist at Brandwatch, confirmed that “neutral” should be “undetermined.” This morning, October 29, Newsweek published a clarification, but left the charts as they were, despite missing sentiment data for 90% of their tweets.

Worlds Apart

With the help of Gilad Lotan, chief data scientist at Betaworks, we grabbed the social graph for everyone in the dataset and visualized it using a fantastic open-source package called Gephi.

We used that information to map the universe of people who contributed to #Gamergate, clustering them into groups based on their relationships.

While there are hundreds of small communities represented by this visualization, it’s clear they group into two major groups: on the left, pro-Gamergate. On the right, anti-Gamergate. In the middle, a handful of controversial people engaging both sides. And on the margins, a constellation of isolated people unrelated and disengaged.