This might be one solution to the nation’s immigration problem: Donald Trump haters on Twitter say they will flee the country if he becomes president.
In our favorite social media analysis so far this year, the digital analytics firm Luminoso scoured 4.5 million Trump-related tweets from Aug. 7 through Sept. 9 and found about 4% of them were people promising to leave the country if Trump wins the White House.
Here are the top destinations in those 200,000 “intent to move” tweets:
- Mexico: 75,000
- General: 69,000 ("I'm moving if Trump is elected" but no location specified)
- Canada: 25,000
- United Kingdom: 11,000
- Australia: 6,000
- Alaska: 5,800
- France: 2,000
- Hawaii: 1,500
- Jamaica: 1,200
- Ireland: 1,100
- Sweden: 1,000
- Brazil: 1,000
Certainly the folks moving to Hawaii and Alaska may be surprised to arrive and discover that Trump is still their president because those places are actually part of the United States.
Luminoso’s Denise Christie said the firm was not looking for this result in the Trump tweets — it was just a pattern that emerged from their content analysis.
A similar look at tweets about Hillary Clinton showed a different pattern, she said. “There are really strong emotions about Hillary, but most of those are about how Hillary should be going to jail,” and less about people saying they will leave the country.
Luminoso describes itself as “an artificial intelligence-based text analysis company that grew out of the MIT Media Lab in 2010.” The tweet study analyzed only tweets that expressed an opinion, not simply retweets of news stories or or hashtags.
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