Tariffs

Posted on Wed, 09/04/2019 - 19:19 by sc933

I know you guys have heard of tariffs and all the Trump vs. China debate on the news or online. the news or from other people. But do you know much about tariffs or are you just throwing around a word that you haven't heard since your glorious high school days. Donald Trump says that he is implementing tariffs because he is tired of being pushed around by China. For those who don't know, a tariff is a tax on imported goods placed by one country onto another. Most times the tax is placed on specific goods or types of goods coming from another country. For example in this circumstance the U.S. tariffs are primarily targeting steel imported from China. Typically, the tariffs are meant to inspire the citizens and business owners of the country to buy domestically and help out their fellow Americans. But who knows what the public thinks of them. To begin to explore this question we came to Twitter. 

In order to collect the data on what Twitter users thought I used a software through Google Sheets called TAGS v 6.1. This software enabled me to capture tweets using  the hashtag tariffs. As this topic is of great debate, at this time, initially thousands of tweets showed up. I narrowed it down by filtering out all of the retweets and then primarily focusing on 100 of the tweets. 100 tweets, I felt would give me accurate and reasonable data for my research. To code the tweets, I created five different categories in order to get a true sense of what the tweets were trying to convey. These categories included: Stance, Rationale, Political Affiliation, Countries/ Cities mentioned, and Purpose. I felt that these categories would capture the key aspects of the conversation.

 What the tweeters think about the tariffs imposedFigure 1

 

This graph in Figure 1 captures the primary reason for me researching this topic. When I am browsing social media, I always see posts that have primarily negative views on tariffs; however, I do see some posts that take positive views on the issue. I wanted to see how twitter users really felt on the issue. Even though this is such a small sample size I felt that it would give me a good estimation as Trump made controversial statements about tariffs the same day I was conducting my research, thus people were quick to comment on the topic. Of course, there is some political bias that we will have to look past as in any international topic there will be some sort of bias.The bias will primarily occur due to a sense of nationalism as certain people will always support there countries. My research found that 53% off people were against tariffs, whereas, just 12% of people were for tariffs.The one that really caught my eye was how only 1% of people were neutral. I do not want to confuse this with the "uncertain" category, as that 34% represents the number of tweets in which the tweeters did not take a stance on the issue. 

 

 

 

Figure 2

This graph above shows the different reasons people had for their views on tariffs. As is evident in figure 2, most people had two reasons for tweeting about tariffs. The primary reason people had was political. This was a slight surprise for me at first because I expected economic rationales. In retrospect, it should not have been that big of a surprise. Especially with an international topic in a time in which our President is so outspoken, it makes sense that politics will influence perspectives. I also thought that a lot more people would rationalize their stance on the tariffs based on how they would be effected personally. While about 10 tweets researched did discuss personal impact, a majority of them did not consider it. Since over half of the rationales were political, I decided to look at political affiliation of the tweeters as well. 

 

 

 

Figure 3

 

I debated whether or not I should conduct research on this category because most people do not put their political affiliation on twitter. It would be easy to speculate and guess which way people were leaning based on their tweet, but I did not take note of the political affiliation unless if it was clear and obvious to me. I would say that a large majority of the people researched held true to the beliefs of their party. So people leaning left were primarily against tariffs and people leaning right were for tariffs. 

 

Most of the data I found in my coding and analysis went hand-in hand with what I expected. My primary reason for researching #tariffs was that wanted to know how much people actually knew about the topic as opposed to just going along with their political party. An interesting thing I started noticing in my research was the different purposes people had of tweeting, whether it was to give people information, argue with them, or simply make fun of the other side. What I found was that most tweets were just ridiculing the other side and primarily those against the tariffs were ridiculing Trump. Many of the tweets which were informative had links to articles such as the example given below. Several tweets were like the one below where they would respond to an informative article and ridicule Trump over it. All in all this project helped me gain a deeper understanding of how people behave on Twitter.