#Hillary2016: A hashtag with positive and negative connotations

Posted on by Max Darrow

Social media has increasingly become an outlet for people to express their political views. With the 2016 Presidential Election less than a year away, people have been Tweeting away, both supporting and bashing their favorite and most hated candidates.

But one candidate who gets a lot of attention? The Democrat’s frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. I decided to use Hashtracking.com to see how much traffic the hashtag #Hillary2016 was getting. From 3:23pm to 8:27pm on Nov. 29, there were 1,500 Tweets featuring the hashtag – both positive and negative Tweets. As for the negative ones, some are policy digs, some are more subtle, others are very personal attacks. Here are some examples:

As you can see, there are some very negative Tweets. However, there were also a lot of very positive ones as well. Some give personal praise, some give policy updates, and others just show general support. Take a look:

As Hillary is arguably the most well-known candidate who’s been a prominent figure in Washington for years, it makes sense to see the amount of social media attention she’s getting.

Though social media is an easy way for people to express their opinions – both positive and negative – it still won’t have any serious influence on the outcome of the election. Now if a serious influencer were to send a Tweet that was extremely negative or positive about a candidate, that might have more of an influence. But if you take a look at the amount of retweets and likes these Tweets are getting, their opinions really aren’t making that many impressions in the grand scheme of things.

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