OpenBrief
Log in Sign up
What the picker changes
  • Top topics digest — the cards score the selected period against the prior 4 weeks.
  • 12-week heatmap & outlet matrix — show the 12 weeks ending at the selected week (they slide back with the picker, they aren’t a fixed snapshot).
  • Per-topic volume / alias drift — same 12-week trailing window, anchored on the selected period.
  • Coverage gap quadrant — scores the selected period against the 12 weeks before it (not including it).
  • Anomaly cards — only show alerts the detector fired during the selected period. Quiet weeks legitimately show none.
What stays as-is
  • Outlet orientation strip / lean colours — context-only, drawn from the last 12 weeks of activity regardless.
  • Co-occurrence graph — recent-activity anchored, not picker-driven.
  • Source & topic profiles — all-time data for the topic; the picker doesn’t affect them.
Rolling 7 days is a sliding live window for “current vibes”; switch to Weekly to compare specific weeks side-by-side.
live window
NZ political social media

This week, on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Facebook

Topics, framings, and platform patterns derived from the social corpus — tweets, Reddit posts, YouTube videos, Facebook page posts and their comment threads, plus Meta Ad Library disclosures — joined on the same canonical topics as discourse, press, and audio. Cards rank by engagement-weighted volume (likes + 2×shares + 3×replies), so a single viral post lifts a topic the way it does on the platform itself. Click any card for the topic detail.

Top topics — Last 7 days

The canonical topics with the most engagement on social media in the trailing 7 days — a sliding window, so the cards keep working through the Monday handover. The trend figure compares the selected period to its prior 4-week mean. Stance bars (where visible) show how the AI classifier read the per-edge framings; sentiment bars show whole-post emotional valence. Distinct signals: a post can be supportive of a topic and negative in tone (an angry supporter), and the lens disentangles them.

Free Sign in free to see the AI sample framing plus the stance and sentiment bars on every top social topic. Sign in free Log in

How this lens works

Posts are polled from each platform's public API on a cadence (Twitter Basic tier hourly, Reddit every 30 min, YouTube and Facebook daily). Each post's text runs through a topic extractor that maps it onto the same canonical topic taxonomy used by discourse + press + audio — so a topic that spikes here will show up on the other lenses too. Two AI classifiers run in sequence: a 5-class stance classifier on each (post, topic) edge (supportive / critical / dismissive / neutral-explainer / mocking) and a 3-class sentiment classifier on each post (positive / neutral / negative). The two together capture texture short-form posts compress into very few words.