Olympia Snowe’s Health Plan Vote Sparks Outrage on Twitter [Stats]

One of today’s big political stories is Senator Olympia Snowe going against her party and casting the lone Republican vote that enabled the Senate Finance Committee to pass a $829 billion health care bill.

The news sparked an instantaneous reaction on the social web, where tweets about the bill and Snowe dominated Twitter’s trending topics earlier this afternoon. On one end, people were happy that the bill is starting to make progress, on the other, Republicans were furious that Snowe deserted her party.

Once again, we turned to Crimson Hexagon for some data analysis, and in this case, it looks like outrage won the day. Tweets insinuating Snowe should be ashamed, leave the party, or be called in protest added up to 59% of the total volume of tweets analyzed about the story. Meanwhile, 37% were in favor, while 4% didn’t really care.

Combined with the collective confusion and hostility we saw last week when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, does this point to Twitter moving in a more conservative direction? It’s probably too early to confirm that, though in August, CNN penned a widely shared piece “Liberal bloggers admit conservatives have upper hand on Twitter.”