How the power law is unfair, even if you have the power to make laws
An MP's voice is amplified by their Twitter presence - but even they can't escape the brutal rule that determines who gets noticed
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Spare a thought for Allan Dorans. He’s the MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, and the SNP’s shadow spokesman for crime and policing. Aged 67, as of last week (happy birthday, Mr Dorans!) he’s a former detective inspector with the Met Police (1972-87), since which he’s been a substitute teacher, and volunteered as a “befriender” for people with alcohol and/or mental health issues. He entered Parliament in 2019 on a 2,329 (5%) majority in the seat. You’re wondering where Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock is? Wikipedia can help (as it did with the above paragraph):
Dorans is also the MP with the fewest followers on Twitter, of the 591 accounts recorded by Politics Social: his account, set up in September 2020, has just 913 followers (as of the morning of Thursday 4 August). He’s following 758 accounts, some for no discernible reason (what’s this one got to do with A/C&C business, or anything at all?), but most to do with things like Scottish independence, trade unions and so on.
Why does he have so few followers? Because his tweets are very dull. He’s pleased someone is taking a bill forward. Dogs die in hot cars. He’s delighted to meet some people. He has said things in Parliament. Occasionally he does retweet other people who are pushing more to the outrage side of things, but they get essentially zero traction. That doesn’t mean that people who try to include him in conversations on Twitter aren’t pushing the outrage button, such as this one:
However, he doesn’t rise to the bait: there’s no response to tweets like that. Not only are his tweets dull, so are his general reactions.
So anyway, what is all of this about? We hear a lot about MPs who have caused shock, horror etc because of something they have tweeted. Most recently it was the Secretary of State for Culture, Media And For Some Reason Sport, Nadine Dorries. She’s come to public attention twice in the past week or so: first, for contrasting the £450 price of ex-chancellor and Tory leadership contender Rishi Sunak’s shoes with those of (Dorries-supported) rival contender Liz Truss’s £4.50 earrings. (Odd how the Conservatives are now not meant to be the party of aspiration.)
That tweet raised a few hackles even within the Tory party. “FFS Nadine! Muted” responded Angela Richardson, another Tory MP. (She supports Sunak.) It was a neat little example of how quickly groups can polarise. At least she didn’t block Dorries, or try to get her thrown out of a WhatsApp group.
Then a few days later she retweeted a Photoshopped image showing Sunak as Brutus, stabbing Boris Johnson (to whom Dorries is politically utterly devoted) as Caesar in the back, thus showing her grasp of both culture and the use of media to spread it.
The second tweet in particular prompted dramatic responses. There’s a grim history of MPs being attacked with knives or swords in the UK (Labour MP Stephen Timms, 2010, survived; Labour MP Jo Cox, 2016, died; attempted multiple MPs, 2017, failed; Tory MP David Amess, 2021, died). Sure, the Shakespearean allusion is lost on nobody, and the Tory party is fond of saying, in one of its increasingly common defenestrations of a leader, that “he who wields the knife will not be king”. But the spectacle of the person who is meant to be steering the Online Harms Bill through Parliament, and overseeing how hate speech is tackled, retweeting something describing a fellow Conservative as a usurping knife attacker came across as a bit salty. Colleagues protested. She un-retweeted.
On social media, Dorries has a dodgem-car approach, especially to Twitter, careening between Entirely Predictable MP Tweets (Happy #Yorkshireday!) and Snipey Putdowns (lately of Sunak, but also of critics of the Online Harms Bill that she was meant to be steering through Parliament until it rammed into the iceberg of insufficient time. (She claimed - another tweet! - that this was due to Labour putting down a “cynical” Vote Of No Confidence, or VONC, which had to be debated, and stalled the bill’s progress to the next Parliamentary session in the autumn. In fact, the Labour VONC was denied Parliamentary time because the vote was framed as confidence in the prime minister, not the government. So the government itself put down a VONC in itself, using up valuable parliamentary time that could have been used for, say, the Online Harms Bill on something it knew it would win.)
Quite the contrast, then, between Dorans and Dorries, who has accumulated about 153,000 followers since joining in January 2012. I think you could fairly say she, or her staff, have always sought to stir things up through Twitter, as this glimpse into her 2017 election tweets shows:
Although one could easily devote an entire piece to the question of the two wolves fighting inside Ms Dorries, the more interesting thing I wanted to illustrate is how Twitter shows power laws at work.
Here’s a graph of how many followers each MP with an account has:
Shown like that, the graph isn’t particularly helpful, but it does show the dramatic dropoff from the first (4.6m) to the fifth (786,000). As we’re all used to graphs now (thanks, pandemic), the first thought that will come into most people’s heads is: what if we plotted that as a log graph?
What this now shows is three clear regions. To explain what they’re about, we need a brief diversion into the Power Law, which occurs all the time online. It’s covered in Social Warming (now in paperback!), but briefly: life is unfair, and big things tend to get bigger, as we observe at every level from galaxies to stars and black holes to planets, while small things tend to stay small while also being more numerous. It’s there in income distribution, where a few people have ridiculous amounts of cash, and more have absurd amounts of cash, and many more have sensible amounts, and colossal numbers have inadequate amounts. Or music, where you get a few superstars who seem to get all the airplay, and a big set of middle-ranking groups, and huge numbers of jobbing musicians trying to break through.
It’s there too in the much less important matter of Twitter followers, where a few people get lots of followers, and lots of people have few. There’s an exponential decay in numbers, from the very top down to the bottom. So in the graph above, the biggest account (Johnson) has about twice as many as the next (former Labour leader, now enforcedly independent Jeremy Corbyn), who has about twice as many as Keir Starmer.
The remarkable thing about a power law is that it looks the same no matter where you are: the decay factor means that if the person ahead of you has 25% more followers than you, the person below you sees you as having 25% more than them. Converting those exponential numbers to logarithms means the exponent just becomes a multiplier; on a graph that shows up as a simple slope. The bigger the exponent, the bigger the multiplier, the steeper the slope.
The graph above shows that there are clearly three classes of MPs when it comes to follower numbers: a star class where the power law is very strong (the red slope), where it’s less strong (the middle black dotted slope) and where it’s extremely strong for those at the tail end (the right-hand black dotted slope).
The first group covers the top 90-odd MPs (measured in followers). Here, “celebrity” has a big effect on following. Theresa May is the fourth-most followed, yet hasn’t held a government job for more than three years. Her tweets are also pretty dull - not Dorans-level, but hardly far off.
So there’s a certain amount of hustling among the top 90-odd to get noticed. Dorries comes in at No.42. See if you can guess who the fifth-most followed is, after Johnson, Corbyn, Starmer and May.1 It’s quite interesting to try to guess at the rest of the rankings, down to say, No.20, and compare them against the list at Politics Social. Bear in mind that it’s a mix of “who you used to be” and “who you are”. (People who used to be MPs and so have huge followings, eg David Cameron, aren’t included.)
Get past the 90, and it’s all much of a muchness: followers dwindle from the mid-50,000s down to No.580, with 3,500 followers. And for the last ten MPs it falls off much more quickly, down to the uncomplicated Mr Dorans. Twitter tends to know what people are worth, doesn’t it?
Another interesting thing to watch is who is gaining followers the fastest. Politics Social shows the number of followers gained in the past 24 hours (side note: past week would be a lot more sensible), and while for most it’s in single digits, for a few it’s into the hundreds. For Sunak, on the day I grabbed the data, it was 538; for Truss, about 1,100.
Maybe it’s trying to tell us something. Nobody’s ever called Twitter a voting system. But it feels worryingly possible that it might know what’s going to happen.
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David Lammy, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary - so the man opposite Truss, in theory. He’s got about 780,000 followers.