Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
This is a, to me, super-interesting article! I love data analysis. Check it out.
I dont normally post about politics (Im 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 Trumps twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data:
When Trump wishes the Olympic team good luck, hes tweeting from his iPhone. When hes insulting a rival, hes usually tweeting from an Android. Is this an artifact showing which tweets are Trumps own and which are by some handler?
Others have explored Trumps 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? Ive 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. Whats 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 Id agree with @tvaziris analysis: this lets us tell the difference between the campaigns tweets (iPhone) and Trumps own (Android).
The dataset
First well retrieve the content of Donald Trumps timeline using the userTimeline function in the twitteR package:1
Much more with code and pictures at:
http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/