6.2.1. Example: Trump Tweet Sources

In 2016, when Donald Trump was running a campaign to be the US President, one twitter user pointed out that you could see which of the Tweets on Donald Trump’s Twitter account were posted from an Android phone and which from an iPhone, and that the tone was very different. A data scientist decided to look into it more and found:

• “My analysis … 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. …. this lets us tell the difference between the campaign’s tweets (iPhone) and Trump’s own (Android).”

(Read more in this article from The Guardian)

Note: we can no longer run code to check this ourselves because first, Donald Trump’s account was suspended in January 2021 for inciting violence, then when Elon Musk decided to reinstate Donald Trump’s account (using a Twitter poll as an excuse, but how many of the votes were bots?), Elon Musk also decided to remove the ability to look up a tweet’s source.

Reflection Questions

We can ask ourselves some questions about authenticity in this story:

• How do you think about the authenticity of the Tweets that come from Trump himself?

  • Do you think it matters which human typed the Tweet? Does the emotional expression (e.g., anger) of the Tweet change your view of authenticity?

• How do you think about the authenticity of the Tweets that come from others in Trump’s campaign?