Rugby Twitter Positivity Rankings - April Edition

06 Apr 2021

Recently there has been a lot of attention placed on those in the small minority on social media who criticise players, referees and those commenting on rugby. So I've started to flip this and highlight the good stuff by taking a look at the most positive rugby writers and personalities on Twitter RFC.

The last 100 tweets of a selection of rugby related Twitter accounts with over 3000 followers were run through a machine learning algorithm, and a positivity score was given based on the sentiment of the language used.

Michael Lynagh comes out as the clear winner, with a stack of positive tweets, an achievement that I hope he ranks as highly as winning the 1991 World Cup. In second place is Dougie Vipond, Premier Sports leading man, showing that not all Scots are grumpy! Rounding off the top 3 is former England Captain, Catherine Spence. Now running the Inspiring Women agency, she's certainly doing a good job of inspiring positivity on Twitter.

The other end of the results is still a positive place, where everyone in the sample had more positive tweets than negative. @RugbyKino had the lowest ratio, but interestingly the majority of these tweets where headlines from the papers, showing perhaps social media isn't the only place where negative language is used to garner clicks. Amazingly, Simon Thomas from WalesOnline is now second from bottom, having previously been first when I ran this last time (the last time I ran it, Wales were on course for a Grand Slam, maybe that's got something to do with it!)

If you would like to see how positive your own tweets are, buy me a coffee with your handle in the comments I'll run the analysis and let you know how you rank among the great and the good.

The full results are shown below: