This January, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. Due to allegations of Trump and one of his cabinet picks (Rex Tillerson) having ties to Russia, there’s been a significant amount of discussion on social media. Using Sysymos, we took a look at trends surrounding the hashtag “Russia” on Twitter.
BREAKING VIDEO:#RexTillerson speaking at oil conf. in #Moscow, #Russia 6/2014 #trumpleaks #rejectrex #tillerson #exxonknew #theresistance pic.twitter.com/e8oc4krmuG
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) January 11, 2017
The above photo was the most retweeted tweet using the hashtag #Russia in the month of January. Scott Dworkin, the co-founder of the Democratic Coalition, made this tweet to increase distrust of Trump and his administration. Rex Tillerson is Trump’s Secretary of State, and had done business in Russia in the past as the CEO of Exxon.
This graph shows the distribution of people who used the hashtag #Russia across the globe. The United States clearly dominates the Twitter conversation surrounding Russia, which is not surprising given the impact of the country on the U.S. presidential election process. This was especially true in January since Donald Trump was sworn in during the month.
Use of the hashtag peaked on January 11th, shown in the graph above. This could be traced back to a CNN article from that date that announced Russia denied having compromising material on Donald Trump. When big articles are published, social media traffic drives up to discuss them. One thing that shocked us was the absence of a spike on Inauguration Day (January 20th).
The Buzz Graph shows words commonly used in tweets that reference Russia, and connections between these words. The Word Cloud simply shows the most common words that accompany Russia in a tweet – the bigger the word, the more often it’s used. As the graphs show, Trump is the most common word in connection with Russia, which makes sense because of his alleged ties to the country. Putin is also a substantial connection in both graphs. The perceived relationship between Presidents Trump and Putin has been discussed heavily on social media, and these graphs prove this.
Our analysis of #Russia showed that people are often tweeting about the country in relation to the U.S. political climate, particularly President Trump.
By Nick Fathergill, Matt Reil, Nick McGowan, Rebekah Boulos, and Keith Bremer