By Katie Hirsch, Sari Kamp, Emily Kilman and Jaymi Zimmerman
We created a search boolean that would provide results that included either ‘Trump,’ ‘Pelosi,’ or ‘inquiry’ in addition to ‘impeach’ or ‘impeachment.’ We chose this setup because it ensured that each tweet would be talking about the impeachment inquiry that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced at the very beginning of our search period.
The activity during our search period spiked on September 24th towards the end of the day as that is exactly when Speaker Pelosi announced the inquiry. The trend line also shows that more people were tweeting about it during (North America’s) day than in the middle of the night which is to be expected.
pro brasileiro que curte imitar o americano: ta rolando processo de impeachment contra o trump, ta? fica a dica bjo tchau
— Maria Rita (@MROFICIAL) September 24, 2019
The Twitter user with the most retweeted tweet of our search boolean is based in Brazil and tweeted in Portuguese. This is odd because the topic at hand is based in the America and the tweeter is not an American politician, pundit or journalist.
79.3% of the tweets our search boolean produced were tweeted out of the United States, which, during the time of our search, held this content as a political hot topic. Despite the majority of tweets coming from the U.S., the most retweeted tweet came from Brazil.
Examining the word cloud, there were many interesting words not included in our boolean that appeared. Examples such as ‘Ukraine,’ ‘Biden’ and ‘whistleblower’ all show up, which makes sense as they are all topics that relate to the original boolean.
Our buzz graph shows that our boolean search terms were indeed correlated with other terms we considered using such as ‘President,’ ‘speaker,’ and ‘Donald.’ The words this buzz graph collected accurately represent the overall theme of the tweets we assumed we would find.
Good call adding ‘impeachment’ and ‘impeach’ to your search – just doing Trump or Pelosi or inquiry would’ve likely given you way too many results! It was also a good choice of topics in general because it’s really interesting to see how often it is tweeted about on a general day vs. days of breaking news vs. the aftermath of large announcements.
Also weird that the top tweet was in Portuguese and came from Brazil! I often assume European countries pay the most attention to our politics, but I guess Brazilians pay a good amount of attention as well!
Overall a really informative and interesting analysis. Nice job!
I would love to know when Brazil was so involved in the impeachment inquiry more than any other country. Interesting finds!
This is such a great topic to choose and obviously an issue around the world. It’s interesting how you expected to find only American related interactions but the analysis showed otherwise. That would definitely bring you to more stories and information.
This topic is so relevant to what is going on in current news, so great job choosing an interesting topic! Also, the fact that there is such an interest from over seas just shows how much people are interested in our politics and the American system. Job well done!
I think this topic is super relevant right now, and I think that makes it a great one for this particular assignment. Because the impeachment inquiry is so important, I think you guys got some insightful analytics and chose a topic that would actually generate interactions. I also was really surprised that the most retweeted Tweet came from Brazil!