Initial Statistics

Prior to looking at the sentiment data, let’s briefly go over some summary plots so we can see what the data we are dealing with looks like. Plotting the number of tweets per day we find that there is a lot of variance; there is an obvious peak on the first day and there is no consistency with what day of the week had the most tweets as one might expect with a regular show. The day with the 2nd most tweets was the 13th June, this coincides with the day after Maura entered the villa; given her actions in the first few days prompted 486 complaints to Ofcom (the British TV regulator this is not a surprise. The very notable troughs observed every 7 days all fall on Saturdays; the only day of the week Love Island is not aired. In the first 3 weeks of Love Island, there were 1.08 million tweets that explicitly referenced the show; an average of over 51,000 a day.

Given our interest in the islanders themselves we can take a look at how many tweets reference at least one of the cast members; over the first 3 weeks an average of 55.9% of tweets a day specifically name at least one of the contestants. This summary statistic doesn’t paint the full picture however; we see the percentage rising as we progress though the series as twitter users “get to know” the cast more and start to have favourites and grow to like / dislike couples more. Of the days the show is on, in the 3rd week we find that well over 60% of tweets mention of one of the islanders, whilst they can’t see their twitter at this moment in time (participants have no access to the outside world during their time on the show), when they leave the villa this sort of activity about them personally will be a huge change in their life. The day with the highest percentage of tweets specifically mentioning an islander was 16th June, this was the second “re-coupling” and the first time in the series there was a lot of drama coming to a climax.

Trending Sentiment per Islander over time

In order to assess if we can see the on-screen events in the corpus of tweets scraped, we can find the sentiment and aggregate per day all the tweets that mention by name an islander. The only filters we shall use are excluding days where we see less 100 tweets per islander (to reduce noise in the graphs) and including only tweets where the sentiment is not 0, again to reduce noise (and given we want to observe reactions to events, not having a reaction and simply just referencing should be excluded!)

Overlaying the “event bars” from the above timeline plot will help us correlate what is happening on twitter with what happened during the show. Whilst we are focusing on the sentiment score, it is important to consider the number of tweets about each islander; this might not only explain the sentiment score (if it an extreme value for example) but also will give us more insight into what is happening in terms of reaction to events.

Firstly, concentrating on the plot of the female islanders, we see a number of interesting trends; looking at the pink line of Amy we see how she starts off as one of the most popular islanders in week one but as the series goes on she becomes one of the most unpopular. The opposite is true for Amber, who starts off the series as the least popular female but finishes as one of the most popular; when she came into the villa she was seen as too upfront and rude but as she had more airtime and she began to develop a relationship with Micheal, the public began to warm to her. Anna follows a similar pattern to Amber however tweets are initially slightly more positive about her, given their friendship it is not surprising that the publics reaction to them follows the same trajectory. Yewande is the female islander who stayed “in favour” for the longest time; she had one of the highest mean sentiment scores for the first two weeks yet in the third week she starts to fall out of popularity.

Next moving onto the male islanders, much like Amy, Curtis starts as one of the most popular islanders and as more shows are aired his popularity drops, given that Amy and Curtis were a strong couple from the very first show it would be expected that they had similar trends. Micheal is the one islander (out of both male and female) that maintains popularity right through the whole of the first three weeks, he is also the only islander to have a mean score of over 0.4 on any day. Whilst in part 1 of this investigation we saw that Tommy was one of the most popular islanders (in terms of number of tweets) to be spoken about prior to the show starting, when the series began he consistently received some of the lowest sentiment scores per day. Anton is the one boy to consistently grow throughout the series; he started as one of the least popular and ended this period as one of the most popular, this is down to his intro video being very poorly received due to some of the comments he made however when we saw what he was really like, the public warmed to him, this is evidence for how much power the producers of the show have and how they can really dictate the on-screen image of the contestants.