Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half

[TransitJohn]

This is a, to me, super-interesting article! I love data analysis. Check it out.

I don’t normally post about politics (I’m 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 Trump’s twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data:


When Trump wishes the Olympic team good luck, he’s tweeting from his iPhone. When he’s insulting a rival, he’s usually tweeting from an Android. Is this an artifact showing which tweets are Trump’s own and which are by some handler?

Others have explored Trump’s 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? I’ve 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. 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. Overall I’d agree with @tvaziri’s analysis: this lets us tell the difference between the campaign’s tweets (iPhone) and Trump’s own (Android).
The dataset

First we’ll retrieve the content of Donald Trump’s timeline using the userTimeline function in the twitteR package:1

Much more with code and pictures at: http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/

[Tommy_Carcetti]

1. Interesting.

I have no doubt that Trump's most unhinged tweets are written by Trump himself and not outsourced to staff as is typical for most normal politicians. They're written in exactly his own unique NPD language.