For Twitter users in North America, Asia or anywhere in the world, there's a little hashtag that may from time to time stray into your Twitter trends. That would be #auspol, one of Australia's most popular hashtags, which also rated third globally among trending political topics on the social media platform in 2015.
On Twitter's 10th birthday, it's time to explain this seemingly immortal, often cranky, hashtag to the rest of the globe.
What is #auspol?
Short for Australian politics, #auspol is most often used for commentary and rumour spreading about the machinations of the federal government.
The #auspol hashtag was there for all of Australia's most recent political bloodbaths, including the unusual phenomenon of having five prime ministers in five years. Then-prime minister Kevin Rudd getting rolled by his deputy Julia Gillard in 2010? #auspol was there. Gillard getting rolled by Rudd in 2013? #auspol was there. #auspol was even there when former prime minister Tony Abbott ate a raw onion live on camera in 2015, shortly before getting rolled by the current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
While not all Australian political conversations on Twitter occur under the #auspol umbrella, it's useful simply because it's so generic. "It is part of the political furniture in Australia," commented Axel Bruns, a professor of media and communication at the Queensland University of Technology, who has been tracking the use of #auspol for a number of years.
Its long life is in marked contrast to political hashtags in other regions, which are usually spiked by a particular event and then expire. Only the U.S.'s #tcot, or "top conservative on Twitter," which led political trends in 2015, seems to have a similarly persistent, yet uniquely unhappy, shelf life.
"It's very much consistently the most visible, the most active hashtag in Australia," Bruns added. "If we look at only [users identified as Australian, around 2.8 million total], then they generate about 9,000 or so tweets a day with the hashtag throughout the year." A Reverb report pulled by Twitter for Mashable Australia shows that between February 21 and March 21, there were 760,000 total tweets using the hashtag.
And of course, there are days when use explodes. Just look at the #auspol spike Monday morning, when Turnbull held a press conference to raise the possibility of an early election in 2016.
The birth of #auspol
Searching back on Twitter for the hashtag's first mention, it appears #auspol could easily have gone in a very different direction. Its first remaining mention -- tweets or accounts could have been deleted -- came in 2009 from @austinist, an Austin, Texas culture outlet, which appeared to be tweeting a hashtag for Austin politics.
But Australia began to claim #auspol for itself in 2010, when Twitter user Emma M. or @Bosun_McShiny was among the first to take it up.
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There was a smattering of tweets in early 2010, but the hashtag really took off Sept. 7, 2010 when a bit of political showmanship lit the hashtag afire, a spokesperson for Twitter confirmed. That was when independent members of parliament Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott announced they would be joining with then-prime minister Julia Gillard to allow the Labor party to form a minority government.
According to Twitter's data, 241 tweets were sent using the hashtag on Sept. 7, with 1,569 and 1,562 on the days following.
From there, #auspol quickly became a useful means of sorting political tweets from the chaff without using too much of the platform's 140-character limit. After all, can you explain exactly how someone is a fascist if your hashtag takes up too much room?
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The #auspol diehards
According to Bruns, #auspol is used not only as a means of sorting through information on Twitter, but also by the community to argue like an unhappy family at Christmas dinner. While some users employ the hashtag sporadically, others use it specifically to speak with one another.
"There are a handful of very active users, which I would number 200 to 300 or so, who are using the hashtag to engage with each other ... debating with each other, talking to each other about Australian politics," Bruns explained.
While it can be difficult to clearly identify where Twitter users live and what they do, Bruns suggested the core #auspol group are not professional politicians or pundits. "They are really much more political junkies," he said.
The exact political affiliations of #auspol users also remain similarly unclear. Nevertheless, Bruns and his team have looked at the overall structure of the Australian Twittersphere by examining follower networks, and found that within the overall political clusters there are groups politically left and right of centre.
"The most active users of #auspol would be across those two sides," he said. "The more hard right faction and the more leftist faction, I think both are represented here."
#auspol and abuse
On its best days, #auspol can be a great way to get your political fix. On its worst, it's a sewer.
Even on Sept. 7, 2010, arguably the day the hashtag took off, a scroll through the day's tweets shows the inevitable sprinkling of expletives, sexism and abuse.
In other words:
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Is this type of behaviour typical of #auspol? "The short answer is yes," Bruns said. "#auspol is a place, it seems to me, where there is a lot of very spirited debate ... which can sometimes be very strong in tone, possibly abusive."
He suggested, however, that because the most active users are constantly conversing with each other, from the outside, it's hard to say whether their tone is perceived as offensive. "[It could] be abusive or more an in-group way of speaking between people who have been arguing with each other for years, in some cases," he said. "To an outsider, it will certainly seem fairly aggressive."
While #auspol is popularly accepted -- news outlets and politicians regularly use it -- spending a day on the hashtag is at your own risk. Or at least, until Twitter gets harassment on the platform under control.
Whither #auspol?
Faced with stalled user growth in recent years, Twitter is being forced to contend with serious questions about its future. If it falls, so falls #auspol. At least in its current form.
Should the platform ever shut down, fans of #auspol will have to decide where else they can congregate. In Bruns' view, Facebook would not be a suitable substitute. "Facebook is a much less public medium ... you can't easily have that broad public debate," he said. "There isn't really anything quite like Twitter, or within Twitter, quite like #auspol."
As for the heavy #auspol users, he would not be surprised if they found a new home on Reddit, if they're not already there.
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It's also worth considering whether #auspol would retain its spark if Australian politics settled down, as Turnbull surely wishes it would. As Bruns pointed out, the growth of Twitter has in many ways mirrored a decade of government instability in Australia. Since Twitter got its start in 2006, the prime ministership has been particularly unstable, alongside dozens of other #auspol worthy controversies.
In any case, the shaping of politics by new communication platforms and social media is just getting started. #auspol, for one, has left its mark on Australian politics. "It's not a pure representation of political opinion in Australia ... but we see in #auspol a distilled version of overall political debate, probably a little bit exaggerated, a little extreme," Bruns said.
With 2016 shaping up to be an election year, #auspol will surely strengthen its hold on Aussie Twitter, one backstabbing and one bulb vegetable at a time.
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