On Thursday the attention levels for Macron and Le Pen were neck and neck. But then attention swung dramatically in favour of Macron, mostly because everyone was talking about the email hack. The next day he won the election.
In this chart we’ve multiplied the number of articles about Macron and Le Pen published by major media sources in the US and the UK by the number of organic shares the articles earned on Facebook.
The major peak in the chart happened around the final debate. Attention for both fell before Macron got the big boost that put him in the lead at the end.
The remarkable insight here is that yet again we find the combination of media coverage and the response to that coverage reflecting real world outcomes. Correlations are not the same as causation, but we are finding more and more reasons to pay close attention to this relationship.