At least one point following the most recent election, you must have heard the name Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or at least about the new surge of women joining Congress. A 29-year-old from The Bronx, New York, Ocasio-Cortez has been making waves as the new representative from the 14th District as the youngest female to be elected to Congress. Whether or not those waves are good or bad depends on the person, which is where Twitter comes into the equation. People on Twitter have had mixed reactions to the young Democrat and I wanted to take a look at those reactions and the reasoning behind them.
Methods:
To start out, I used a program called TAGS v6.1.9.1 to compile all the tweets under the hashtag #aoc. That inevitably left me with a lot of tweets -- over 9,000 to be exact. To narrow that down, I filtered out retweets and focused on the first 100 tweets in order to get a preliminary idea of what I was dealing with when it came to the hashtag. Ocasio-Cortez can be very controversial, so I was interested to see what I would find while analyzing these tweets.
To do so, I created five separate categories: the stance toward Ocasio-Cortez, what the tweet was about (her, her policies, other), the gender of the tweeter (if determinable), the action conveyed (supporting, bashing, mocking, questioning, other), and the specific focus of the tweet (climate change, president, gender, election, international, other). It took a couple of hours to sort through approximately one hundred tweets and profiles, but ultimately I came up with a few outcomes that I will present now.
Outcomes:
When I finally made it through the 100 tweets, the first thing I noticed was how completely wrong my hypothesis of what the data would show was. I anticipated a lot of support for Ocasio-Cortez despite the plethora of backlash she has faced throughout her time in office. What I gathered, however, was a bunch of tweets primarily against Ocasio-Cortez.
For example, take this tweet written about AOC's disdain toward the electoral college:
Trash tag #aoc is stupid. The electoral college will not be abolished or replaced. She is waiting for a bus that will never come. pic.twitter.com/gnRgdE2OHa
— KT Matthews (@KTMatthews2) August 26, 2019
This particular tweet utilizes a photo mocking AOC and a clear negative tone toward her. This is one tweet of many that used negative language toward her or her policies. In fact, 67.7% of the 100 tweeters were against Ocasio-Cortez or her policies (Stance Toward AOC) while 23.2% were for her.
Another outcome that wasn't as shocking was the gender of the tweeters. I personally presumed a lot of men would be talking about Ocasio-Cortez, especially after deducing most of the tweets were negative toward her. Almost half of the tweets were composed by men and the "unsure" and "female" categories were about the same with over 20 tweeters in each (Gender of Tweeter). If the "unsure" category was dispersed and the gender of all the tweeters was known, the results could be different, but my conclusion comes from the data in the below figure.
Another category I found particularly interesting was the action verb category which organized the tweets based on the tone and purpose. With most of the tweets being from men and being against Ocasio-Cortez, it wasn't surprising to find that the tone and intention of most of the tweets were to bash her. In fact, over 30 of the tweets possessed a bashing tone with supporting, mocking, and the other category being tied for second (Tone and Purpose of Tweets).
The focus category helped wrap up my conclusions by telling me what most people were focused on. A major issue, excluding the other category, was the election (Focus of Tweets). This option encompassed anything relating to the election of Donald Trump, the election of Ocasio-Cortez, or the upcoming election. While some tweets couldn't be narrowed down into one specific category (hence the option for "other"), a lot of them provided key insight into what was on the mind of some of the tweeters.
Conclusion:
From this data, I concluded that people using #aoc, particularly men, possessed negative opinions toward the representative mostly about topics such as the election or just in general, a conclusion that was made based on hashtags, use of pictures, or use of negative language. This is not to say that all men have a negative opinion of AOC or that all women have a positive opinion of AOC. 100 tweets are not enough to determine this outcome. However, based on the data I have collected I have concluded concretely that of the 100 tweets I analyzed, the majority are negative, from men, and are about the election (excluding the "other" category).
Twitter is essentially an online community of smaller communities where discourse can be had about any topic imaginable. In this case, the tweets I examined were in relation to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and showed a primarily negative reaction where a majority of men made comments pertaining to the election or to climate change. While I went in with one expectation of how most of the tweets would be structured, I was surprised to see that things are not always as they seem when it comes to Ocasio-Cortez.