How #AlDub exploded across the Twitterverse

 

 

It looks like an explosion, and in some ways it really is: the above video clearly shows the wildfire spread of #AlDub tweets across the Philippines.

 

The past few weeks have really seen a veritable explosion of posts on Facebook walls and Twitter feeds on #AlDub, the “accidental” segment on Eat Bulaga that has had a phenomenal following for some time now. 

 

Some Trends
 

In the plots below, we count the number of tweets recorded for each of the terms for every hour of everyday for the entire month of August.

 

In the first plot, we only look at the tweets with the patterns “eatbulaga” and “showtime” in them. Eat Bulaga and It’s Showtime are two primetime shows of the two maor rival TV networks. From the plot, we can see that there are more tweets associated with “showtime” (“ItsShowTime“) than “eatbulaga”. This has been the trend on Twitter for quite some time now.

(Note that it is highly likely that this distribution of “televiewers” is skewed, i.e. Viewers are not necessarily the same as Twitter users)

 

Then the #AlDub phenomenon happened. The way people have received this 30-minute Eat Bulaga segment makes it more like a TV program in itself. Look at the trends below. The graph is the same as the plot above, but this time, we added the “AlDub” curve (blue).

The difference is stark! #AlDub single-handedly stole the show, blowing competition clear out of the water.

 

The huge spike in the number of recorded tweets is especially interesting. What happened on 22 August 2015? Googling “aldub august 22 2015” hints to the episode titled “The Wedding of Frankie and Yaya Dub”. This was also the day when the hashtag #ALDUBAgainstALLODDS trended worldwide.

 

Word Cloud

This is in fact captured in the word cloud below, which shows the most common words in the collection of tweets on “AlDub”.

 

Geotagged Tweets
 

This brings us back to the video at the beginning of this article: we can further filter the tweets into those that have geotagging, i.e. the tweets that have associated locations with them. This, of course, limits the data points in the set since not all Twitter users in the Philippines have activated their location trackers. Be that as it may, the video shows a CartoDB visualization of the tagged tweets as they are being tweeted across the Philippines.

 

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EF Legara is a physicist by training, a complex systems scientist by profession, and a data hobbyist and amateur stock trader by leisure pursuit.

 

She advocates financial literacy, data-driven policymaking, and the establishment of a strong scientific culture—in the Philippines and elsewhere.

 

An earlier version of this article appeared on her blog.

 

The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of this website.