The flag of the United States of America is above the flag of Donald Trump. Credit: Unsplash, CC0 (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
The analysis of billions of phrases found in the social media site showed new insights into the timelines of the many major stories surrounding Donald Trump. The findings will be presented in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 8, 2021.
It is difficult for people to understand the historical impact of a story over time. Dodds and colleagues suggest that it is necessary to systematically track the dynamics of stories surrounding the subject over time to address this challenge.
The researchers have developed a new method for analyzing and constructing timelines of stories surrounding any given subject. To demonstrate it, they analyzed all of the social media posts related to Trump from 2016 to 2021, using their technology to measure the temporal dynamics of stories.
The timelines produced by this analysis highlight key dynamics of the stories surrounding Trump. The turbulence of these stories differed over time. Trump's first year in office was the most turbulent, with a variety of dominant stories, such as "Russia" and "Comey." Turbulence declined and dominant stories continued for longer periods. The Black Lives Matter protests, the 2020 election, and the Capitol attack caused turbulence.
The degree to which Trump controlled the narrative of each story was measured by the amount of his retweets. It was high for "fake news" and "Minneapolis" but low for "Jeffrey Epstein" and "coronaviruses" over time.
The findings show that this method can improve understanding of historical events. Future research could extend the method to more people.
The authors say that in 2020 story turbulence around Trump exploded with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the presidential election, but also ground to a halt as these stories dominated for long stretches.
Computational timelines reconstruction of the stories surrounding Trump: Story turbulence, narrative control, and collective chronopathy. The journal's citation is: "Posy ONE 16(12): e0260592.
The journal contains information about the PLoS ONE.
The dynamics of stories surrounding Trump's presidency were revealed on December 8th, 2021.
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