Brexit Today - Where's Boris

This is a summary of a more detailed post over here on our DataSwarm company site:

We have been tracking Brexit (the British Exit of the EU) for about a year now using our DataSwarm systems, as a side project to test our system’s predictive analytical capabilities (we predicted the Brexit referendum correctly all those years ago, as well as quite a few other “surprise result” elections since – see here for more details).

One of the more interesting features of Brexit has been the fate over the last 9 months or so of the one of the most high profile and flamboyant politicians in the Pro Brexit camp (the "Brexiteers"), one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, better known as Boris Johnson, or just “Boris”.

To recap for our non-UK readers, Boris was one of the main personalities in the Leave Europe campaign leading up to the Brexit referendum vote, but - after David Cameron (the Prime Minister at the time) resigned the morning after the unexpected result to Leave came in. Boris exited the ensuing tussle for Prime Minister, and Theresa May won the internal Tory Party election and then scraped back in as Prime Minister after (just) winning a General Election.

At any rate, post these elections Boris again threw himself into the task of championing the Leave cause, and from the get-go captured a very large amount of the UK mindshare around the Brexit arena. Chart 1 shows his prominence in March this year.

Chart 1 – Zeitgeist Chart for Brexit, March 2018



But a week is a long time in politics, and 9 months is an eternity, and when we look at the same chart of the memetic heavens now, his blob is not nearly as prominent.

Chart 2 – Zeitgeist Chart for Brexit, December 2018



So what has happened? An examination of the opinion and idea sub-streams underlying Brexit overall over the intervening months points to 3 main causes:

The actual process of the negotiation has risen in the overall mindshare as March 29th 2019 approaches
Others have actively started to make more running as That Day draws near
The “Boris Camp” has been changing tack over recent months, and going for Gravitas. The shift has been to adopt a more serious, thoughtful, dare one say Leader-like approach

So, watch this space. Or better still, come back and watch us watching this space.

A short note on what the DataSwarm system does

The DataSwarm Analytic Engine tracks opinions and ideas from social and other media. It registers their rise and fall in the mindshare of groups of people (this change over at any time what we call the Zeitgeist), whether of large groups like the British population, or smaller subgroups (for example cosmetics users, whisky drinkers, online TV consumers, bitcoin buyers and various other client projects). Just to make it more interesting (i.e. complicated), large groups comprise of smaller groups each with varyingly different idea and opinions sets. We also track how these varying idea sets combine, split, recombine and generate new Zeitgeists in different subgroups. It’s fairly complex analytics, but very powerful – hence our ability to predict elections that surprise all the pollsters, pundits and politicians. See here for more: