Trump. The American president who uses Twitter to spout nonsense and demonstrate to everyone that he has, at best, a lacking understanding of American and global politics today. But what do other people on Twitter think of him? His simplistic and impulsive approach to life and politics seems to embody the way many people view internet discourse. But do they accept him and his outlook, or do they reject him the way most progressive people have? Perhaps more importantly, why do they talk about Trump? And who are the people actually doing the talking?
In order to find out more, I decided to study people using the hashtag "Trump." To do this, simply put, I harvested all the tweets with #Trump from a week, deleted the retweets, deleted the tweets that weren't in English, and chose the 100 most recent tweets from those remaining. From there, I sorted each tweet based on a few categories: the opinion on trump, if the tweet came from within the US, the main method of persuasion, and the perceived purpose of the tweet. Regarding perceived purpose, I created four categories that I noticed tweets seeming to fall into, exposing, informing, persuading, and insulting.
Informing tweets were primarily factual, making it difficult to tell if they were for or against Trump. Exposing tweets offered information about Trump, often phrased in a way that seemed intended to reveal Trump's embarrassing behavior. Persuading tweets coupled information with a stance, and were often less emotionally charged than exposing tweets. Insulting tweets seemed to not have any substance and, instead, were intended as cheap shots against Trump.
Who is Tweeting Using #Trump?
To start, I want to examine who exactly is tweeting about Trump.
I decided to track where people were tweeting from, wondering if Trump Tweets were primarily from the US or outside the US. Out of the 100 tweets I examined, 65 reported the location. Of those, 38 came from within the US and 27 came from outside the US. This wasn't what I expected. I had anticipated that a higher percentage of tweets would have come from within the US. After all, Trump is the American president. However, I'm not that surprised that a fair amount of Tweets came from outside the US. Our world is extremely interconnected and Trump's actions and behavior affect people around the world.
What Are People Tweeting About Trump?
When I went into this project, I assumed that roughly half the Tweets would be approving of Trump, and that half would be opposing Trump. I didn't take into consideration that a large number of tweets would be unclear in their stance until I started trying to code them. I had considered that some tweets might be from news sites but every article has at least some bias. However, most news articles were able to hide their bias for 240 characters, thus making their opinion on trump unclear. I was shocked that 68% of Tweets opposed Trump as compared to a11.3% that approved of him. I had thought that it would be closer to 50/50, so a difference of 56.7% was really interesting to me.
How Are People Talking About Trump?
I wondered how people were discussing Trump, mainly what rhetorical appeals were they using to promote their arguments?
I characterized Tweets based on if their main support came from pathos (emotion), ethos (credibility), or logos (logic). I found that most tweets relied on pathos as their primary evidence. This is unsurprising to me as Twitter is a fairly casual place for conversation. Thus, people feel like they can say whatever they want without much to support it. The second most-used support came from ethos, typically in the form of a linked news article. I saw linking an article as adding credibility to the argument because it shows that there is support. I only coded one Tweet as logos. This also makes sense to me. Twitter only allows 240 characters, which makes creating a logical argument difficult.
Why Are People Tweeting About Trump?
The last aspect that I wanted to focus on was the purpose behind the tweets.
After reading through many #Trump tweets, I came up with four categories that seemed to encompass most of the Tweets. It seemed like most people seemed to tweet either to persuade people about Trump, inform about Trump, insult Trump, or expose Trump. I then created the categories as action verbs: exposing, informing, persuading, and insulting. I found that most Tweets were intended to persuade. The second most common intention was to inform, followed closely by to insult. A fair amount of Tweets were also intended to expose. I saw persuading Tweets as attempting to sway the reader one way or another about Trump. Exposing Tweets and informing Tweets are similar; however, I tended to categorize Tweets as informing when I could not tell if they opposed or supported Trump. Informing Tweets were almost always news articles. Exposing Tweets tried to inform; they just did so in an obviously biased way. Insulting Tweets were ones that were just meant to bash Trump. Below, I have included a prime example of an "insulting" Tweet.
That is my thought. As fast as #Trump is mentally decompensating, he will just be an orange pile of drool by this time next year. https://t.co/7ZBfa8kx4C
— Ann Marie Hoff (@Annimallover) August 26, 2019
Wrap-Up
Overall, my findings were that most Tweets came from within the US and opposed Trump. Tweets tended to use pathos and were intended to persuade the reader one way or another about Trump. However, it is important to note that my sample was not large, I only analyzed 100 Tweets. Also, I only analyzed Tweets from August 26th, 2019. Additionally, this summary does not capture all Tweets that were about Trump, it exclusively examined Tweets with #Trump in them.