How did men and women talk about the episodes?
We should point out that we’re working with Twitter data only here, since Reddit accounts aren’t categorized by gender by Brandwatch.
It turns out that women are actually bigger Black Mirror talkers than men, with 54% (or 140k unique authors) categorized as female.
Women paid most attention to Hang the DJ and Arkangel and also spoke relatively less about Metalhead than men.
Meanwhile, men seemed most enamoured with USS Callister.
Dating drama Hang the DJ was fairly popular with both men and women.
Which episodes were most disturbing?
This is our favorite question we like to put to our Black Mirror data. It’s one we answered last year when Playtest of season 3 was clearly the most terrifying.
This year, we took all tweeted mentions of each episode over the first few days of release (excluding retweets) and then found out what percentage of each set included distressed terms like “freaked out”, “creepy”, “I’m crying” etc. It turns out that the least mentioned episode, Metalhead, also had the highest % of scary descriptors. To be fair, it was dark.
Next up was Arkangel and after seeing exactly how a piece of technology built for protecting a child completely tears apart the relationship between a mother and daughter, I can see why it was high up there.
Perhaps most surprising is Crocodile’s placement near the middle. Horrifying things happen in this episode. Horrifying, horrifying things. You get to the end and think no, not even Black Mirror would do that – oh wait, yep, they did it. Oh god. Perhaps people were too broken to tweet about it – I certainly was.
Hang the DJ is definitely well placed at the bottom of the list – while it’s definitely a bit eerie, it’s generally a pretty positive story.
We were a little surprised to see Black Museum was second least disturbing. It’s the final episode, in which a woman called Nish goes to a museum of awful technology’s past and the audience hears three very grim stories of how technology (historically propagated and now displayed by all round awful human Rolo Haynes) destroyed lives (and deaths). That said, you definitely feel good for Nish in the end, so maybe people held back on the freaked out tweets.
What did you think of Black Mirror Season 4? Let us know @BW_React.