Was Margaret Thatcher a valiant reformer who jerked the UK out of a death spiral, or an extreme individualist, who destroyed the fabric of civil society? This polarizing and often emotional discussion is taking place now on TV, radio, kitchen tables, and social networks in the UK and many neighbouring countries. As Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian – “Something intensely political is under way: a society wrestling over the memory of its most towering recent figure.” Today, much of that discussion is happening now on online social networks.
We set out to analyse the sharing activity on news stories discussing Thatcher’s death to determine how the online world reacted to her passing. We found that of the 6,474 articles about her death published in the subsequent 24 hours, the most-shared stories were predominantly negative. Sharing activity on headlines such as “Thatcherism Was a National Catastrophe That Still Poisons Us” (shared 1,980 times on Twitter and 3,837 times on Facebook) and “21 Incredibly Angry Songs About Margaret Thatcher” (2,082 tweets, 11,301 Facebook shares) vastly outweighed more positive headlines like “Tributes Pour in for Margaret Thatcher” (800 tweets, 1,608 shares), by a factor of almost four to one.
While most of the top social stories about Ms Thatcher were neutral reports of the facts, a surprising number were attacks. Analyzing the sentiment expressed in the top fifty most shared news articles in that 24 hour period, 8 were positive, 28 were neutral, and 14 were negative on the former Prime Minister.
Overall, negative stories were significantly more popular on social media than the positive ones, generating 340,000 interactions compared to 95,000 – a nearly 4-to-1 split in favour of the “Ding Dong” camp. Evidently the maxim “don’t speak ill of the dead” doesn’t hold much water for social media users when it comes to this topic. As street parties sprung up around Britain (and in Argentina too), social media became a venue for real debate of Thatcher’s legacy, rather than just tribute-paying.
As we’ve noted before, it’s often the most remarkable or emotional events and stories that inspire people to share. When you read a piece of news that affects you personally – you often want to share it with your friends. If there is one thing Thatcher could do, it was inspire an emotional response – and it seems that at the end of her life, the strongest emotions were from those who saw her not as a national hero, but as a divisive and destructive leader.
On the day her death was announced, the most-shared article in the world by our metrics argued that respecting the grief of the Thatcher family is “appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize”, but that critical discussion of her life and policies is still relevant, essential and appropriate. As is clear from the biggest social stories about Thatcher’s life, it’s now a lot harder for socially constructed taboos to get in the way of real, public discussion of government policy and how it affects peoples’ lives.
