When news circulated that Channel 4 was about to run a report exposing teen virtual world Habbo as a “paedophile haven” my instant reaction was first ‘wow’ then ‘really’?
A low degree of inappropriate content and interaction is physiological in any social platform, especially in the ones that allow real-time interaction. But the extent of the phenomenon clearly makes the difference. Not having other data available I wanted to look at what the actual teenage users were saying about the issue. So I setup a search on Pulsar about Habbo.
After one day of tracking, social data gives me the answer I’m looking for.
A quick data visualization of the most retweeted users talking about the story shows a few interesting things:
1) The most retweeted users are mostly teenagers who are either users or ex-users. Of the top ten users by engagement 8 are teenagers, 2 media (The Next Web and Channel 4). Habbo seems to be still relevant to that audience, either as a good memory of bygone times or as an actual necessity now: “you have ruined a day for 2 millions people” as a Habbo users addressed Channel 4 Programme Editor Oliver King on Twitter.
2) The top ten users by engagement (number of received retweets of relevant content about the story) are generating massive engagement levels ranging from the 10th, @Channel4news, with 193 Retweets, to the first, @drawkcabilahsti, boasting 818 Retweets (as of June 13 at 17:51 PM).
3) As for the tone of the conversation, more analysis is required to get to any solid conclusions, but there’s definitely two different discourses going on here and the feeling that one demographic is not really getting what the other is talking about.
