The power of injustice

Each week we rank Strictly contestants based on social media analysis. We call this the Strictly Sentiment score.

Someone told me this was just a dance show. But it wasn't. It was more than that. It was a movement to correct an injustice.

Ok it was only a dance show and let's not get carried away with too much psychobabble but something pretty special did happen on Saturday. The Strictly public could see that there was an injustice being done to Maisie and acted to correct it. 

Maisie is one of the best dancers in the show. If you add together the judges scores from all rounds of Strictly, Maisie is joint top with HRVY on 153 points. Yet she was in the bottom two last week and the week before. We discussed in week 5 why this might be - the public hasn't warmed to her confident nature, her previous dancing experience counts against her and the public has put its arm around other contestants at Maisie's expense.

But things began to change after the dance off last week. Looking at tweets back then we could see the start of a movement to get behind Maisie. People could see that what was happening to her did not look right. It was unfair and a bit mean. She's a good dancer and putting her in the bottom two was unjust. Despite her confident persona it was clear that being in the dance off twice in a row was affecting her.

The Maisie Movement built up huge momentum on social media during Saturday and the collective arm, that had previously been placed around Clara, was put around Maisie instead. Her sentiment score this week rose to its highest ever and she is top of the leaderboard when combined with judges scores. 

The Maisie Movement reinforces two things. First, it again demonstrates the enormous power that social media has to influence decisions. Second, that humans instinctively react against unfairness.

The big question is whether the Maisie Movement is permanent or a one off to correct an injustice?

Strictly Sentiment leaderboard

Bill has been top of the Strictly Sentiment leaderboard since the launch show but his lead has shrunk over the last two weeks. Bill might not be thought of as a natural-born dancer but he has wowed the nation by being rather good. As the series has hotted up his sentiment score has declined.  Has he lost his wow factor or are viewers more appreciative of the technically better dancers in the line up? 

What helps Bill is that there isn't a clear challenger to him at the top of the leaderboard. There has been a different person in second place in each of the five elimination shows (Nicola, Ranvir, Clara, Jamie, Maisie). Perhaps a challenger will emerge next week.

Clara was eliminated this week after being rescued by the public vote last time. The sentiment on social media is that people really like her but it was right that she be in the dance off based on her dancing.

That pesky fairness thing again.

We predict the dance off by combining judges scores with Strictly Sentiment score. This week we correctly predicted that Clara and Jamie would dance off.

We will do it all again next week.

Don't forget that we tweet our prediction one hour before the results show on Sunday.



Strictly Sentiment score

The Strictly Sentiment score is derived from a sentiment analysis of tweets. Using natural language programming and machine learning we classify each tweet as positive, neutral or negative. Tweets are filtered so that they only relate to a celebrity's appearance on the show rather than what they do in their 'day job'. Only tweets made between 7pm and 10pm are included. This is to ensure that tweets relate to Strictly.

We then add up all the positive tweets for each contestant and assign a score between 1 and 100.  This score is based on the relative distribution of positive tweets. We do this to make it easier to compare and contrast Strictly Sentiment scores.