Every American is, by now, fully aware of Donald Trump‘s Twitter habits. Trump is a notoriously prolific Twitter user, something that’s gotten him in trouble in the past. Recently, though, Twitter watchers have noticed a shift in Donald’s tweets, and it’s been alleged his campaign has, at least in part, taken over his Twitter feed. And data scientist David Robinson has not only proven this is true, but how to spot a genuine Trump tweet.
For reference, it’s not unusual for a politician’s staff to run their “personal” Twitter account, but as a rule, tweets from the person in question and tweets from staff are clearly marked. For example, when Hillary is tweeting directly, she ends her tweets with an “-H.” The Trump campaign has no such designation. So Robinson simply downloaded all the public Trump tweets the site allows you access to, and ran a data analysis on them looking at word content, hashtags, metadata, and other metrics. And he found several signs when Trump is at the keyboard and when his campaign is, such as:
- Trump’s “Real” Tweets Come From Android: Yes, that observation going around on Twitter is absolutely true. Campaign tweets come from an iPhone, but Trump himself is a dedicated Android user.
- Trump Tweets In The Mornings: A breakdown of Android tweets versus iPhone tweets finds Trump is an early riser, and tweeting the most between about 5am and 10am.
- Trump Is Negative: Robinson’s breakdown of the tweets found Trump was far more likely to use words like “badly,” “weak,” and “dumb,” while his campaign tweeted substantially more positively. Robinson also found that the content of Trump’s tweets were more likely to be negative: A tweet from Trump himself is, for example, is up to 120% more likely to express disgust than a campaign tweet.
- They Start With A Quote Mark: Trump is not a big fan of the retweet button. His RTs start with a quote mark and are the tweet itself copy-pasted into the body of the tweet.
- They Lack Pictures And Hashtags: Trump may be slick with copy and paste, but he’s not a fan of pictures or of hashtags; he rarely, if ever, tweets either of them.
Robinson has also noted the campaign either occasionally attempts to imitate Trump’s voice, or Trump occasionally wrests the iPhone away from them. We hope it’s the former; imagining some campaign staffer reading his boss’ tweets and desperately trying to imitate them is just depressing.
What? You thought we were going to say something else?
(via Variance Explained)