Data Scientist David Robinson caused a bit of a stir in the media when he analyzed Donald Trump's tweets and revealed that those sent from an Android device were likely sent by the candidate himself, while those sent from an iPhone were likely sent by campaign staffers. The difference? As seen in the chart below, Android-based tweets used angrier, negative words while iPhone-based tweets tended be straightforward campaign announcements and hashtag promotions. The news was reported in Scientific American, the LA Times, PC Magazine and David even gave an interview with Time magazine.
David used the R language and several contributed packages to analyze Trump's tweets. (The R code behind the analysis is available on Github as an R Markdown document, which also makes an excellent example of literate programming with R.) He used the twitteR package and the userTimeline function to download tweets and metadata from the @realDonaldTrump account, which formed the raw data for the analysis. The tidytext package function unnest_tokens extracted and standardized individual words from the tweets, from which simple tabulation generated the chart above of words more frequently used by iPhone and Android tweets. The tidytext package was also used to measure the sentiment of the words used, and again there was a clear difference between iPhone and Android tweets in use of words related to sadness, fear, anger and disgust; and surprise, anticipation, trust and joy.
For more details on David's analysis of the Trump tweets, and a fascinating hypothesis that an iPhone-based staffer is attempting to emulate the style of the real Trump's tweets, check out his blog post linked below.
Variance Explained: Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
I don't know who get the idea first, but gawker had made a twitter bot which tweet only the Android ones:
https://twitter.com/RealRealDonaldT
http://gawker.com/our-trump-twitter-bot-filters-out-donald-trumps-new-han-1783906386
Posted by: SwiftAMHE | August 19, 2016 at 01:29
Thanks! @RealReadDonaldT is actually linked in the first paragraph of the article above :)
Posted by: David Smith | August 19, 2016 at 09:21
Trump should be angry as hell, the USA is going to hell in a hand basket, he wants to save it and make it great again.
If the Americans want the same old wars Clinton is signed up for, then we (the world) really have no hope. Moving a first strike weapon so close to Russia is asking for problems, they had 20 million of them killed in the last war, they wont let it happen again.
Posted by: Ade T | August 22, 2016 at 04:21