If you’ve seen the London Eye over the last few nights and are wondering why it’s looking more colourful than normal it’s all to encourage people to talk about politics — and cast their vote on May 7.
Every night until voting day on May 7 the iconic London landmark is being lit up to reflect the General Election discussions on Facebook.
On May 1 the “London Eye Chart” showed that UKIP was the most talked about political party on Facebook between Jan. 1 and May 1, with 15.6 million interactions and three million people talking about them. (Obviously we have no way of knowing whether the comments were positive or negative…)
Taking the second largest piece of the political pie chart that night was the Conservative Party with 12.2 million interactions from 2.5 million people, followed by Labour with 9.7 million interactions from 2 million individual Facebook users.
More:Around 20 million people won’t vote in the General Election
On May 2 the pie chart reflected the main political parties discussed by men and May 3 showed female Facebook discussions. Yesterday covered the top five election-related issues and today will show the main political parties discussed in Scotland. Tomorrow’s topic is the main party political leaders and Thursday — election day — will be a surprise.
“Politics is huge on Facebook — we expect it to be the most discussed topic in the UK this year,” said Facebook’s politics and government specialist Elizabeth Linder.
“We’ve seen over 52 million interactions related to the General Election so far this year, and we’re excited to be able to bring this conversational election to life in the heart of London using our data and the iconic Coca-Cola London Eye.”
The light show starts at 9:30 p.m. each night and has been created by design studio .
“During the last election we created the Parliamentary Waffle House, an election-themed eatery featuring a food based swing-o-meter. For 2015 we are delighted to use the huge volume of Facebook conversations about politics to create an inspiring installation that we hope will encourage people to have their say — on Facebook and at the polls on 7 May,” said co-founder Sam Bompas.
More on SheKnows UK
Thanks to YouTube we can all learn to cook like Masterchef‘s Simon Wood
Big change to umbilical cord protocol is a win for babies
Why wolf-whistling shouldn’t be a crime
Leave a Comment