During his interview with Surveillance News yesterday, UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson was chuffed to have recently pipped Labour’s attempts to, ah, get down with the kids. Earlier this week, the PPUK Facebook group overtook the Labour Party, with 6691 members compared to 6356 for Labour. Admittedly, if you take the number of group members and add that to fanpage members (two slightly different things), Labour’s total is in fact still ahead of PPUK. Still – despite its limited manifesto (”a blessing and a curse”, according to Robinson), PPUK has garnered support and national press coverage on its stance on copyright in a matter of months. Whether its Facebook fans are old enough to vote is another question.
It isn’t entirely surprising that a niche group campaigning for privacy, filesharing and freedom of speech should be popular amongst the younger demographic. But perhaps the mainstream political parties ought to be concerned they cannot connect in the same way. SN has compiled statistics to show what the political landscape might look like if Facebook fans/group members were votes. SN wonders what Labour’s digital wunderkind Tom Watson (443 fans) would have to say?
Clicking the image will take you to Many Eyes where you can view and interact with the treemap. It compares PPUK to all UK parties represented in the House of Commons or at the European level. Adjust ’size’ to show Facebook fans, current number of MP’s or current number of MEP’s. Many Eyes is in beta and may take a couple of tries to display.
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