Killbill call to protest democratic health care

#killbill A call to protest Democratic health care legislation

I stumbled across #killbill when I was doing a search for #hc09. I am sure I had seen it before but had not paid attention. They were organizing a protest so I tried to get a search started.

The search phrase is easy for hashtags; it is just the hashtag -- in this case #killbill.

I ran the first search early in the afternoon of November 5, 2006. It picked up 1500 messages on the first pass. The tweets reached back only to 11:50 a.m. Central. The protest was set to start in Washington D.C. in 10 minutes. So I got very little of the use of twitter in the mobilizing stage.

Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? The Washington Post finally gets to #killbill the next morning -- though they cannot get beyond the 'news conference' to the twitter campaign that helped generate it.

The search was discontinued April 4, 2010 with a total of 22,249 messages found. The figure gives the distribution over time.

There are several spikes after the first one. I believe they are all related to health care reform -- though one could imagine using killbill for almost any policy going through the legislative process. Perhaps it will reappear in the future.

The data files are #killbill.xml and killbill.txt, which is a tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.