Top 10 Rankings 2015

Research Note: World Leader Rankings on Twitter December 2015 11 Gender Out of the 112 leaders with their personal names assigned to their accounts, 102 are male and 10 are female. Of those ten females, four fall into the top half of the 2015 ranking, with two of them being in the top ten list. As per a BBC Trending analysis of Twitter activity in Britain, women are still very much a minority in the political chatter there. Twitter, with its 15 million users in the UK, seems to shape the online political debate more than any other platform. However, an analysis of main parties' Twitter hashtags over a month revealed that they were overwhelmingly being used by men and not women. Across all the parties, male users seem to be using these hashtags far more often than female -- 75% of the political party tweets in Britain were from males, 25% female. Interestingly, the Greens and the Welsh and Scottish nationalists - all of which are led by women - had the highest female participation rate. The #SNP tag had 69% male users and 31% women. The #PlaidCymru tag had 38% women compared to 62% men and the Greens had 60% male users, 40% female Laura Bates, who runs the Everyday Sexism project, told BBC Trending that they regularly receive examples of women being threatened with rape, or violent assault as a result of expressing their political opinions online. "Women are being cut out of the political debate because they do not feel safe posting their political views online" she says. "When I visit schools and speak to young children, they tell me that the trolling and abuse they see directed especially at female MPs puts them off pursuing a career in politics or even offering a political opinion" Twitter told BBC Trending that it's trying to encourage a greater diversity of opinions, but that it relied on users to report trolls. National Offices In addition to a head of state using Twitter, many countries also had their national office represented with a Twitter account such as the @WhiteHouse in the USA, India’s @PMOIndia, Turkish Presidency @tccankaya, and the United Kingdom’s @number10gov, among many. Also of note, out of the 139 tweeting “heads of state,” 27 of these were national offices. For some countries, their national office Twitter account was the main or even sole Twitter voice for that government; these included the accounts in the top half such as Germany, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay, Morocco, Qatar, and Croatia. The world’s “most democratic Twitter account” is run by Sweden, which became the first country in the world to hand over the country's official Twitter account to its citizens. Titled ‘Curators of Sweden’ the account @Sweden is managed by the citizens of Sweden. The curators are nominated by fellow Swedes, and the only stipulation is nominees must be Swedish citizens. The idea is that: “…the curators, through their tweets, create interest and arouse curiosity for Sweden and the wide range the country has to offer. The expectation is that the curators will paint a picture of Sweden, different to that usually obtained through traditional media.”

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