Who drove the Komen story? The tweets tell the story

This is pretty interesting–and revealing:

Last Tuesday, the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced it would no longer fund clinical breast exams and mammograms through Planned Parenthood. The $680,000 per year that was going to Planned Parenthood helped provide exams for 170,000 mainly low-income and minority women. The organization claimed that they were tightening their rules for grant recipients and denying grants to any organization under investigation. (A pro-life Congressman from Florida is leading a Congressional inquiry into whether Planned Parenthood uses public money to fund abortions–an initiative many see as politically motivated.)

On Friday, February 3 the organization abruptly reversed its decision amid a firestorm of criticism on Twitter, Facebook, and many blogs.There is little doubt that social and media pressure forced Komen to reverse its plan. The Figure shows the representative Twitter hashtags associated with Komen during the controversy, from January 31-February 3.

Sorting through over 100,000 tweets that were sent in regard to Komen during the controversy, we see that they are dominated by critics of the move. Just three of the top 28 hashtags support Komen’s move (1 is ambiguous).

In order to examine what drove this message, we took a look at a new tool called “influencers” created by the Yahoo! Labs Content Science team, which we are going to use extensively on The Signal. Influencers are the Twitter users who help spread a message. They tweet a lot on a particular topic, are retweeted, and have a big following.

The influencers in this controversy are a combination of official organization Twitter accounts, journalists, and some unaffiliated tweeters. There was both a top element to the distribution of this message, but also a broad-based push, especially in last two days. Pro-life groups never got much traction, with just one influencer on the list.

We can see that the pro-choice groups mobilized well, and we can see that their comments were clustered around pro-choice slogans.

Read more.

From what can be gleaned in the article, the dominant force on this appears to be Planned Parenthood, with tweets linking to its own website.