For our group’s test of the Sysomos Analytic Collection system, we decided to base our search around everything that’s been happening between President Donald Trump, the United States Supreme Court, and specifically Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The story itself is based around comments that Justice Sotomayor made about the future of the Supreme Court if President Trump were to win a second term on Saturday, reported and tweeted out by CNN commentator Kieth Boyd (which was actually the most retweeted tweet from the 7 day period we observed).
Justice Sotomayor is warning us.
If Trump wins, the Supreme Court and the federal bench will be lost for decades.
And all of your progressive plans on jobs, health care, education, immigration or criminal justice reform will be struck down by the courts.https://t.co/ULR1B5Mvcd
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) February 22, 2020
In the query used above, you might notice how we excluded the names of a few of the more conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices. This was to ensure that the tweets we were receiving through our search brought back results from the story that began to gain traction on the 22nd. Without excluding the names of at least a few of the conservatives, many of the most recent tweets were people calling out people like Kavanaugh and Gorsuch rather than focusing on the story at hand.
Over the course of the 7 day period (from February 19th to February 25th) there were many peaks in terms of what was being talked about, with major upticks on the 19th, 22nd, 24th, and 25th.
The first big spike that occurred was on February 19, 2020. This spike happened around 6:00 p.m, when Rachel Maddow began a thread tweet saying, “NYT says Trump is poised to name Richard Grenell as Director of National Intelligence.” This gained a lot of traction online because it happened soon after President Trump’s impeachment just a few weeks prior. Furthermore, it could be linked to the fact that Trump is continuously appointing people to the Department of Justice that skew in his favor, considering the relationship Grenell has with Kremlin-connected oligarch Dmitry Flirtash and potential election tampering by Russia. Our group discussed that this is most likely linked to what Justice Sotomayor stated a few days later.
On the 19th, the hashtag “#criminalclownpresident” was the top trending, based on the query we used. In researching this further, we discovered that Malcolm Nance quote tweeted Minh Ngo, saying “…and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court sits silently. This #criminalclownpresident thinks he IS the law!” which also gained a lot of traction on Twitter.
On February 22nd, Keith Boykin joined the debate in support of Justice Sotomayor stating, “Justice Sotomayor is warning us. If Trump wins, the Supreme Court and the federal bench will be lost for decades.” To date, Boykin has received over 20,000 retweets and 43,500 likes which is the number one tweet during this debate. The popular sentiment among twitter users showed positive support for Justice Sotomayor and a negative response towards President Trump. Trump then responded on February 24th claiming “Both [Justice Ginsberg and Justice Sotomayor] should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump-related, matters! While ‘elections have consequences’, I only ask for fairness, especially when it comes to decisions made by the United States Supreme Court!” Since his tweet on February 24th, President Trump has returned to posting photos from his trip to India and has yet to post any further updates on the topic. He would then, however, go on to mention his comments again while speaking to reporters in India Tuesday morning.
In terms of geography, it was clear to see that most of the engagement this topic was receiving came from the United States but it also began to gain traction in places like India, which would make sense considering that was where he has been visiting for the past couple of days.
It is plain to see that many of the trending words that appear in the WordBuzz put together by Sysomos revolve around some of the buzz words that we used in our query (the largest of which being “supreme court”, “trump”, and “sotomayor”) and many of the other words that appeared are similar to these as well. It was also very clear that both conservative and liberal Twitter users were tweeting about what both Justice Sotomayor and President Trump said. Talks of the President’s impeachment trial also seemed to resurface during this week of discussion, as the word “impeachment” appeared in many forms.
Connections made between words given in the Buzz Graph can also be attributed to the comments made by Trump and Sotomayor as well. In the wake of his impeachment trial, it makes sense that the President and the Supreme Court would be trending together and throwing Sonia Sotomayor’s name into the mix only continues to push this connection even further. It’ll be interesting to see where these comments by Trump will lead and how they will affect the Supreme Court as he finishes his first term if President.
Using Sysomos was a lot less daunting than we honestly thought it was gonna be. The interface was not only easy to use but supplied us with more interesting information about the analytics to this topic than we ever thought we would’ve wanted to know. Systems like this, we agreed, made us excited to hopefully utilize this type of deep-dive analysis in our careers post-Syracuse University.