Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) has nearly 11 million followers on Twitter. What they know about Trump, is that they can rely on the New York billionaire to share his,, let's say blunt (usually) comments on what's happening at any given moment.
But are they getting what they think they are?
A data scientist says maybe not.
David Robinson, who works for the data research firm of Stack Overflow, has a different take on who may be behind some of the tweets.
According to Robinson in an analysis published at Variance Explained, if a @RealDonaldTrump tweet is marked as being sent from an iPhone, one of Trump's staffers wrote it. If the tweet was sent from an Android phone, Robinson surmises, it was composed by Trump, himself.
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Robinson said he downloaded more than 1,000 of Trump's tweets and used a language parser to analyze them.
Here’s what he learned:
• The angrier or more negative tweets are sent from an Android device
• The tweets posted form an iPhone are usually congratulating someone or making announcements or showing photos.
• Tweets from the Android phone tend to come earlier in the day
• Tweets from the iPhone are sent mostly in the afternoon or early evening
• Robinson calculates that the tweets sent from the Android use 40-80 percent more negative words than do the tweets from the iPhone
Robinson suggested in his post that Trump is doing less of the tweeting as the campaign goes on. He gained access to 6,000 of Trump's tweets, and, counting the number of times Trump tweeted from each device, Robinson concluded in his post that "the Republican nominee's participation in his own Twitter account has dropped sharply over the past year. From July 2015 to October, Trump largely ruled the account, with up to three-quarters of @RealDonaldTrump tweets coming from the Android phone. The staff takeover began in November, growing to around 50 percent of tweets before plateauing through the early primary months. But the last month has seen another major shakeup. So far in August, almost two-thirds of his tweets have been sent from an iPhone, suggesting a serious crackdown by the campaign staff."
It’s not the first time Trump’s twitter use has been debated. In April, former GOP primary rival Ben Carson said people have spoken to Donald Trump about his Twitter use and that he knows that it is “a problem.”
"Well, I think he will come to understand," Carson said to radio host Joyce Kaufman. "We talk about it, and a number of people have talked about it, including his family. And he knows that it's a problem. And the first part of solving the problem is recognizing that it exists."
Trump has defended some of his Twitter habits, as pointed out in an article in The Atlantic. He insists he dictates tweets to staffers to post, and says he tweets only after 7 p.m. According to Robinson, the Android tweets typically pick up around 9 p.m.
Some other things Robinson noted:
• Most hashtags come from the iPhone. “Almost no tweets from Trump’s Android contained hashtags …”
• Words like “join” and times like “7 pm”, also came from the iPhone, alone
• Words, like “badly”, “crazy”, “weak”, and “dumb”, mostly come from the Android
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