Mary Jane Veloso was part a group of drug traffickers and smugglers who were to be executed on April 29th 2015. Mary, a Filipino woman, was arrested in Indonesia on April 25th 2010 for alleged possession of 2.6 kilograms of heroin.

On October 11th, 2010 she was given the death penalty. After many appeals, in March 2015 a petition to save Mary Jane (using the hashtag #SaveMaryJane) started in the Philippines. She was subsequently handed a Notice of Execution on April 25th 2015.

On April 29th she was granted a stay of her execution. Eight other prisoners (including 2 members of the Bali 9 group, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran) were executed by firing squad that same day.

We collected tweets about Mary Jane Veloso, the #SaveMaryJane campaign and the #MaryJaneLives response from April 25th – April 30th 2015 (UTC+8 Malaysian Standard Time). What follows is a summary of popularly shared content and the network of users tweeting about the topic.

Top Mentions

Top Media

Twitter Community

MaryJaneVeloso_RTsConversations_1200px

This network graph visualises conversations about Mary Jane Veloso, the #SaveMaryJane campaign and the #MaryJaneLives response between April 25th – April 30th 2015 (UTC+8 Malaysian Standard Time). The full-sized version can be viewed at our Flickr page.

Each Twitter user is represented as a node (circle). The colour and size of the node is based on the number of users replying to their tweets or retweeting their tweets. It is scaled on a range from blue (few users) -> green -> yellow -> orange -> red -> purple (most users).

Users are connected by lines (edges) if one user retweets another user’s tweet, or replies to that user. The thickness of the edge is based on the number of retweets or replies. The colour of the line is a mix of the sender and recipient node colours.

@rapplerdotcom received replies from the most users, so it is both purple and the largest node.

Prominent users (in both size and colour) tweeted content that prompted more replies and retweets from certain followers.

Visualisations like this help to highlight such users, and see the chain of users that are connected to them by way of conversation. By looking at the diagram in detail, you get a sense of which users ‘sparked’ conversations that spread among other users.

Rappler (@rapplerdotcom), its Indonesian branch (@rapplerid) and civic engagement arm MovePH (@moveph), along with GMA News were instrumental in spreading awareness but did not dominate the conversation.

Instead, a great number of users started their own conversations about Mary Jane, sparking conversations within their own respective networks. However the presence of spam bots does make it a difficult to measure the impact of real people.

Here are the top 30 users, sorted by the number of replies and retweets received. This list does include spammers:

1. @rapplerdotcom
2. @gmanews
3. @rapplerid
4. @moveph
5. @chantinilaya
6. @ancalerts
7. @inquirerdotnet
8. @abscbnnews
9. @senyora
10. @teenwordquote
11. @skybro1000
12. @kimpoyfeliciano
13. @komnasperempuan
14. @iamsuperbianca
15. @vicegandalines
16. @mgapinoypatama
17. @textposts
18. @dawnzpost
19. @denniselazaro
20. @rahung
21. @jeffkulubot
22. @jomardlrs
23. @pinoyweekly
24. @jetdsantos
25. @abscbnchannel2
26. @miriambanat
27. @sirbanatero
28. @toogdtoresist
29. @promosiiin
30. @mamoncerdass

There are 54,317 nodes and 89,212 edges in this graph. This was derived from 75,834 users and 158,264 tweets. We only used connections based on retweets and replies. Not all spammers could be identified and removed due to time constraints.

Some zoomed-in portions of the network:

MaryJaneVeloso_RTsConversations_Snip1

MaryJaneVeloso_RTsConversations_Snip2

For a list of our services please visit www.politweet.org/site/main.php

Further reading

Timeline of Mary Jane’s case www.gov.ph/2015/05/03/for-the-record-a-timeline-of-the-ca…

The viral petition to save Mary Jane www.rappler.com/move-ph/91652-viral-petition-save-mary-ja…

Published On: May 7th, 2015 / Categories: Social Media / Tags: , , , , , , /

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