Dataset Information

Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter.

ABSTRACT: The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as "ratios", and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. We find that raw activity counts increase during the period leading up to the 2016 election, accompanied by a regime change in the ratio of retweets-to-replies connected to the transition between campaigning and governing. For the Trump account, we find words related to fake news and the Mueller inquiry are more common in tweets with a high number of replies relative to retweets. Finally, we find that Barack Obama consistently received a higher retweet-to-reply ratio than Donald Trump. These results suggest Trump's Twitter posts are more often controversial and subject to enduring engagement as a given news cycle unfolds.

SUBMITTER: Minot JR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8046224 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter.

Minot Joshua R JR Arnold Michael V MV Alshaabi Thayer T Danforth Christopher M CM Dodds Peter Sheridan PS

PloS one 20210414 4

The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as "ratios", and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. We find ...[more]

PMID: 33852612

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Project description:Priming with race-typed names and religious concepts have been shown to activate stereotypes and increase prejudice towards out-groups. We examined the effects of name and religious word priming on views of a specific and well-known person, President Barack Obama. We predicted that politically conservative participants primed with President Obama's middle name (Hussein) would rate him more negatively and be more likely to view him as a Muslim than those not shown his middle name. We also examined whether conservatives primed with concrete religious words would rate President Obama more negatively and be more likely to view him as Muslim than those primed with other word types. Furthermore, we predicted that those who mis-identify President Obama as Muslim would rate him more negatively than would those who view him as Christian. The results provided mixed support for these hypotheses. Conservatives primed with President Obama's middle name rated him significantly more negatively than did those in the control condition. This effect was not found for politically liberal or moderate participants. Name priming did not significantly affect views of President Obama's religious affiliation. Although not statistically significant, conservatives primed with abstract religious words tended to rate President Obama more negatively than did those primed with other word types. Religious word priming significantly influenced views of President Obama's religious affiliation; interestingly, participants primed with abstract religious words were more likely to think President Obama is Muslim than were those primed with religious agent or non-religious words. As predicted, participants who thought president Obama was Muslim rated him significantly more negatively than did those who thought he was Christian. Overall, our results provide some evidence that ethnic name and religious word priming can significantly influence opinions, even with a well-known and specific person.

Dataset Information

Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter.

Publications

Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter.

Similar Datasets

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