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Wed 10 Aug, 2016 04:41 pm
Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
Quote:I don’t normally post about politics (I’m not particularly savvy about polling, which is where data science has had the largest impact on politics). But this weekend I saw a hypothesis about Donald Trump’s twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data:
When Trump wishes the Olympic team good luck, he’s tweeting from his iPhone. When he’s insulting a rival, he’s usually tweeting from an Android. Is this an artifact showing which tweets are Trump’s own and which are by some handler?
Others have explored Trump’s timeline and noticed this tends to hold up- and Trump himself does indeed tweet from a Samsung Galaxy. But how could we examine it quantitatively? I’ve been writing about text mining and sentiment analysis recently, particularly during my development of the tidytext R package with Julia Silge, and this is a great opportunity to apply it again.
My analysis, shown below, concludes that the Android and iPhone tweets are clearly from different people, posting during different times of day and using hashtags, links, and retweets in distinct ways. What’s more, we can see that the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be benign announcements and pictures. Overall I’d agree with @tvaziri’s analysis: this lets us tell the difference between the campaign’s tweets (iPhone) and Trump’s own (Android).
@Robert Gentel,
Sounds like Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde.
@Robert Gentel,
Fascinating read.
Thanks for bringing in the article link.
@Robert Gentel,
Robert Gentel wrote:
Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
Quote:I don’t normally post about politics (I’m not particularly savvy about polling, which is where data science has had the largest impact on politics). But this weekend I saw a hypothesis about Donald Trump’s twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data:
When Trump wishes the Olympic team good luck, he’s tweeting from his iPhone. When he’s insulting a rival, he’s usually tweeting from an Android. Is this an artifact showing which tweets are Trump’s own and which are by some handler?
Others have explored Trump’s timeline and noticed this tends to hold up- and Trump himself does indeed tweet from a Samsung Galaxy. But how could we examine it quantitatively? I’ve been writing about text mining and sentiment analysis recently, particularly during my development of the tidytext R package with Julia Silge, and this is a great opportunity to apply it again.
My analysis, shown below, concludes that the Android and iPhone tweets are clearly from different people, posting during different times of day and using hashtags, links, and retweets in distinct ways. What’s more, we can see that the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be benign announcements and pictures. Overall I’d agree with @tvaziri’s analysis: this lets us tell the difference between the campaign’s tweets (iPhone) and Trump’s own (Android).
For reasons too arcane for the common citizen, there's possibly a reasonable purpose for the separation. Perhaps, to effect different goals, and they are automatically sorted by different sources?
Isn't that a smart bit of analysis. Re the "sentiment" factor, what a pity the analysis didn't include data on retweets. That might be very interesting. I'd expect that the more malign tweets would be retweeted by his followers at a significantly higher rate.
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