Now here’s an interesting report. Data analysis suggests that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is the sole author of his most negative tweets. His staffers, the report says, are the ones responsible for the composed and semi-lucid tweets. You’ll find them scattered in his feed from time to time. Compare this:
Failing @NYTimes will always take a good story about me and make it bad. Every article is unfair and biased. Very sad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 20, 2016
To this:
Great meeting w/ coal miners & leaders from the Virginia coal industry- thank you! #MAGAhttps://t.co/wnpVlq6oe4 pic.twitter.com/32gdX684ew
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016
Analyzing Donald Trump’s Tweets
David Robinson of Stack Overflow is to credit for a majority of the sleuthing. After hearing about the theory that his tweets exhibited two distinct tones, he decided to investigate further. He reached the following conclusion:
“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.”
Robinson’s analysis looks into the time of day the tweets come from each device. It looks at the likelihood of tweets from each device to contain pictures or links. It even takes into account the curious habit for the Android to retweet content by placing it in quotation marks. A practice known as “manual retweeting.”
The most telling detail, however, is Robinson’s analysis of the language used by both of Donald Trump’s devices. The most negative and “emotionally charged” language comes from the Android tweets.
Combined with the fact that Trump uses a Samsung Galaxy to tweet, the obvious conclusion is that tweets sent from the Android are the real Trump, and the iPhone is just a collection of pale imitators.
The Inimitable Donald
Robinson makes it clear that although the analysis could be wrong, it certainly seems to hold water:
“These tweets certainly sound like the Trump we all know. Maybe our above analysis isn’t complete: maybe Trump has sometimes, however rarely, tweeted from an iPhone (perhaps dictating, or just using it when his own battery ran out). But what if our hypothesis is right, and these weren’t authored by the candidate- just someone trying their best to sound like him?”
To their credit, they are doing their best to emulate the original. Donald Trump though has an intangible quality (shameless jackassery) that mere mortals can only hope to mimic.
Naturally, a particular segment of Twitter wasted no time in calling out Robinson as a Clinton shill:
Wait was that an optionhttps://t.co/HRr4yj30hx pic.twitter.com/ZIpaEgYnrw
— David Robinson (@drob) August 10, 2016
Check out Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, commenting on his colorful use of Twitter:
Featured image via Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
