The angrier, more negative tweets from Donald Trump’s Twitter account are mostly written by the presidential candidate himself, while campaign staffers are responsible for the calmer announcements and pictures, according to an analysis by a data scientist.
Building on the work of a Twitter user who noticed that the tone of Tweets from @readonaldtrump posted using an Android phone were different to those created using an iPhone, Stack Overflow’s David Robinson concluded that they were the work of very different people.
“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,” he wrote in a blog on Tuesday evening.
“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).”
Though the person tweeting from the iPhone regularly tried to mimic the style of the other tweets, negative words such as “badly”, “crazy”, “weak”, and “dumb” were far more likely to come from an Android device.
Using sentiment analysis tool, Robinson found that: “Trump’s Android account uses about 40%-80% more words related to disgust, sadness, fear, anger, and other “negative” sentiments than the iPhone account does. (The positive emotions weren’t different to a statistically significant extent).”
Trump is known to tweet from a Samsung Galaxy.
Another marker indicating Trump is posting from the Android device was his “anachronistic” use of manual retweets, said Robinson.
New post: Analysis of Trump tweets confirms he writes only the angrier Android half https://t.co/HRr4yj30hx #rstats pic.twitter.com/cmwdNeYSE7
— David Robinson (@drob) August 9, 2016
Though the angry and often strangely phrased tweets from Trump’s account have proved controversial, Robinson said he was especially interested in what it must be like to be the anonymous campaign worker attempting to mimic his style.
He wrote: “A lot has been written about Trump’s mental state. But I’d really rather get inside the head of this anonymous staffer, whose job is to imitate Trump’s unique cadence (“Very sad!”), or to put a positive spin on it, to millions of followers.
“Is he a true believer, or just a cog in a political machine, mixing whatever mainstream appeal he can into the @realDonaldTrump concoction? “
