Twitterers amongst the most liberal in Britain

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

I’m going back into my old school in the morning to work with the alumni networks project for state schoolers I’m involved with, FutureFirst. In preparing for this, and for speaking on the panel of the launch of the Young Fabian blog last night, I got to wondering why all my schoolmates are avid Facebook users, while all the people I know in politics are addicted to Twitter. While Facebook is the home of everyday people, I thought, it seems Twitter is the domain of Guardianista-politicos.

Now, in perhaps the most comprehensive survey of political Twitterers yet, Prospect magazine and YouGov have found that Twitter users are unsurprisingly amongst the most political and left-liberal people in the country. 46% of users are younger than 35, the poll finds, compared to 29% of the population, while Twitter users are also more likely to live in London. Indeed, Prospect managing editor James Crabtree said of the survey:

“New technologies are often adopted by the political extremes of left and right. It is clear that the urban, metropolitan, Guardian-reading ‘chattering classes’ have flocked online to become the ‘twittering classes’ – and they are now a real force in British politics.”

Prospect identifies a number of Twittering successes as proof of this – breaking the Guardian’s court injunction banning them from naming mining company Trafigura; attacking Daily Mail writer Jan Moir for “homophobic” remarks on the death of gay pop star Stephen Gately; criticising Sunday Times critic AA Gill for shooting a baboon while on safari; and vilifying Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan and his criticism of the NHS in the US, in the #welovethenhs campaign.

It may be, however, that Twitterers are also out of touch with the rest of the population at large: while 56% of the public believe “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men,” only 45% of Twitter users would agree.

Equally interesting when considering the socio-economic and political breakdown of Britain’s Twitter users, is that left-liberal heroes are amongst the most popular figures from history that users would like to see tweeting were they alive today. Perhaps partly because of their skill in pithy inspiration, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy took nearly 50% of that vote between them.

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