For this CrowdTangle assignment, we chose The Washington Post. The Washington Post was founded in 1877 and is a newspaper printed in Washington D.C. Their articles are available online and are shared on their social media accounts. On CrowdTangle, from October 10th to October 17th, 2018, the one trending topic with the highest interactions was a story about Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. We found this trending topic by seeing where the spikes in the graph were for The Washington Post’s twitter handle and saw they got the most interactions on a post about Khashoggi’s death.
By looking at the graph, you can also see a spike on October 17th. This is the tweet with the highest interactions during this time frame from The Washington Post. The tweet got 10.2K likes and 6.8K retweets. We learned this was a big story for The Washington Post, especially because Khashoggi was a columnist for them and this was published after his death.
In his last Post column before his disappearance, Jamal Khashoggi wrote about the Arab world’s need for a free press. Read it here. https://t.co/L80fitlJZT
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 18, 2018
After we entered the Boolean information into Twitter Advanced Search, the search boolean that came up was ‘”Jamal OR Khashoggi” OR “saudi OR journalist” from:washingtonpost since:2018-10-10 until:2018-10-17. This search boolean helped us locate tweets from The Washington Post about Khashoggi’s death.
In TweetDeck, we used this same Boolean but altered the engagement criteria to find the tweet with the most engagement. We searched for tweets in this Boolean with at least 1,000 likes and 1,000 retweets and this was the tweet that popped up with the most engagement.
Khashoggi’s death is still a trending topic for The Washington Post. In the last seven days, they continued to get high engagement for it.
On October 25th, they tweeted again about Khashoggi and it also got high engagement, although not as high as the first tweet.
In today's print edition, a new full-page ad demanding the truth in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. pic.twitter.com/Hx4BZVPFof
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 25, 2018
This trending topic worked especially well for The Washington Post because they had information no other outlet had (Khashoggi’s final column) and they constantly used Khashoggi’s full name so it would show up in numerous twitter searches.
Group Members:
Ally Heath, Jake Fenner, Mac Konrad, Sara Rizzo, Matthew Bosworth