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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Elle Hunt

#PutOutYourOnions: Tony Abbott remembered as #LibSpill reaches fever pitch

A bag of onions left outside Parliament House in Canberra
A bag of onions left outside Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

First it was on. Then, six hours later, it was over. The speed with which Malcolm Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott as Australian prime minister left social media racing to keep up.

According to the digital analytics agency Max Kelsen, 93,488 unique tweets pertaining to the leadership challenge were sent on Monday. Factoring in retweets and news articles, that figure skyrockets to 344,925.

At its peak, 70,641 tweets were sent in the hour to 10pm, after the party whip Scott Buchholz’s announcement of the results of the spill motion at 9.50pm and armchair pundits furiously filed their takes.

Max Kelsen harvested tweets using the most popular hashtags – predominantly #libspill, #auspol and #libspill2 – to reach these figures, as well as a custom algorithm to capture those that were about the spill but may not have included a relevant hashtag.

Compared with the average Australian Twitter user, those posting about the spill were more likely to be aged 35 or older and the gender split was 57% male to 43% female. Of the 230,733 posts with identifiable location, Canberra, Sydney, and Hobart were the top-tweeting capital cities.

(According to Max Kelsen’s figures, those posting about the spill were also 11 times more likely to read the Guardian than the average Australian Twitter user. It was on!)

The most retweeted

(Then there’s a @BBCBreaking one at No 3, which we’ll leave out because it’s merely functional.)

(It was a good night on Twitter for the SBS host Lee Lin Chin, who had another two tweets in Max Kelsen’s best-of list with 500+ retweets apiece.)

After #libspill, the legacy

Tony Abbott might be gone but he’s not forgotten. After the giddy pace of the unfolding #libspill, Twitter turned its attention to commemorating his legacy.

Max Kelsen recorded 6,400-odd tweets with the #putoutyouronions hashtag sent on Monday but that has since picked up pace, with more people leaving bags of the bulbs at their doors to mark his term as prime minister.

Onions were photographed as far away as Japan and Italy.

And then, of course, the brands got involved.

Attempts to match or supplant the hashtag with #putoutyourbudgiesmugglers and #putoutyourspeedos were less successful, perhaps given the relative scarcity of the item – though some hedged their bets.

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