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make America tweet again that's the provocative title of a new research paper out of won that looked at the
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Tweet surrounding the 2016 Republican primary debates here to talk about the paper and its surprising findings are
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Wharton Professor Ron Burman and doctoral candidate Coleman Humphrey so welcome thank you deorah so tell me why
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did you decide to analyze Twitter versus other types of communication so that's
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actually a very interesting story so our co-authors professor Robert mayor and shirim maluma do a PD candidate at
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Columbia business school they were starting to work on a project using Twitter data um and the focus was how
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emotionality and the device he use changes the patterns but then uh we realized that uh in um elections and
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debates what happens is that people today use Twitter as the main forum for pushing their opinions and debating with
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everyone Etc so this has become like the Twitter election and as a result we wanted to focus very much to see what do
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voters think given what they see on Twitter but also what do voters do on Twitter and how they interpret that now
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we this was about in August at that time it was clear that Trump has a big advantage on Twitter and he's uh getting
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a lot of uh voter opinion and voter advantage through Twitter so combined with that it was very very interesting
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to look at Twitter as does it reflect voter opinion but also can you use Twitter to also influence voter opinion
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and how that works during a debate and can you give us an overview a quick overview of how you conducted the
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research well sure so first um to decide what data to collect we decided to focus
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on three very pivotal debates so the first one was the August debate which was the most viewed primary debate of
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all time um and people were clamoring to see Trump versus bush and who would do better we also um had the February
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debate um which was just before super Tuesday so it was kind of like the last chance for uh one of the other
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candidates to try and derail Trump and his uh amazing poll numbers and then finally the March debate which um people
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were buzzing about because it was back U Trump versus Megan Kelly the the second
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time I guess so within there we collected all the relevant uh tweets from all debates so from an hour
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beforehand to uh two hours after the debates just all tweets that that had the main hashtag in them so we knew they
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were tweeting about the debate uh and from there from this data we were able to you know we have um who tweeted and
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who retweeted what time that all happened at and we also then we applied this program called Luke which um it
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finds was there a negative tone in the Tweet was there a positive tone did you use like um oops sorry did you use
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personal pronouns um was a kind of uh based on like was it a power tweet or a reward tweet and then for a subset of
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the data the kind of the most popular tweets we also sent them off to MK to get humans to look a little bit further
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at the tweets we got um humans to decide is there a picture or a video in the Tweet or does it contain humor or
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sarcasm uh as well so what are the key findings of your paper um so so we found a a few very interesting things some of
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them just didn't conform with past research results and some of them were just brand new the first thing we looked
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at was um what do people see during the debate do they mostly see new tweets or do they
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see more and more old tweets because of retweets of other people and we found that over time you basically have a more
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dated view of of the debate which means if you look very towards the end of the debate actually you're going to see
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mostly tweets from very early on in the debate the second thing we looked at was
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what was the sentiment during the debate uh for different candidates and we found
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that if you looked after the debate versus during the debate you would get a very different view of the sentiment for
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so example for Donald Trump the uh sentiment after the debate was uh very positive while during the debate
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sometimes there were controversies maybe Sensations that generated a negative um
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sentiment uh and finally another thing we noticed is that the Tweet stream becomes more and more Sensational and
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less substantive and in the words of of Bob Mayer another professor o on this colleagu is that during the debate you
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get the New York Times after the debate you getting the New York Post and this is something thing we found out which
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was very interesting do you think this explains why Trump defied expectations to get the Republican nomination for
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president sure this we feel like this what Rono said definitely speaks to um to one of the reasons why perhaps he was
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so popular um Twitter kind of like a lot of other media I guess just really focuses on tabloid or Sensational stuff
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especially afterwards like that's that's what sticks um one of the things we
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analyzed was was sentiment people positive or negative towards certain candidates and you can see for Trump
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that even as something like the Trump University is being discussed um like quite heavily and he's really getting
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hammered for it in the debate his sentiment just like doesn't really seem to drop like uh and and especially after
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debates you can see his sentiment actually goes right back up and and is generally positive after the debate so
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people just really don't care about this this the negative stuff he says just
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doesn't seem to matter um and again building on on what Ron's saying it seems like Trump is the perfect cidate
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for the the Twitter election um since he is so used to generating like Sensational um news and and generating
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controversy and kind of leading towards all the Tabloid stuff and and also avoiding policy where he's probably
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weakest out of all the candidates on the stage and that's what sticks so absolutely um Twitter seems to seems to
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be the medium the medium for him so what are the implications of your findings on
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voter opinions so there are a few implications we think are are playing like are play
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there there there implications on trying to to gauge or to understand voter opinions and and one of the findings is
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that if you analyze Twitter data you might get the wrong idea so if you look during the debate maybe you'll get one
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sentiment after the debate you might get a different sentiment so it really matters when you look at the debate and
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the other thing is um that voters who there are some voters who are very activing the debate and watch it and
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tweet about it Etc but most of the people probably open the newspaper the next morning or open their Twitter and
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say what happened during the debate yesterday and then they look and they see this backwards view which means the
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influence on them is probably much stronger U than what you would get if you watch during the debate one for
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example one thing we notice is that tweets that came from news sources during the debates were very influential
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during the debate and were retweeted a lot Etc but after the debate they were kind of going down if you think about it
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it used to be that there was a debate and news sources maybe would uh um kind of summarize or comment on the results
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after that and you would get what happened Deb during the debate in in a newspaper after that if you look at
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Twitter you would get a very different idea which means that perhaps Twitter is not either a good measurement or maybe
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Twitter is a reflecting uh Forum of the results and the news media is not a good
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measurement and reflecting uh Forum of the results which might cause surprises later
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on did any conclusions surprise you so one interesting uh finding we had which was surprising was how media was almost
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um inactive during the debate in actually commenting on it what they were doing is picking up mostly quotes from
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TV and just tweeting them they weren't saying who they think is winning they
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weren't commenting on facts they were just quoting and as a result during the
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debate people were retweeting them a lot but after the debate they had very very
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very little influence this was one surprise finding the second one is that for many tweets so this comes to
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academic research typically we assume there's something called a diffusion pattern you would have an idea that goes
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up gets retweeted and goes down and dies for many things we saw they barely had any influence during the debate they
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basically died during the debate and then had the Resurgence after the debate so for example um this um basically
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fight almost between Megan Kelly and Trump in August at the beginning generated some attention during the
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debate but then died off and but then after the debate it became the primary thing everyone was talking about and
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just building on that what was also perhaps surprising is that strong positive or negative emotions didn't
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didn't help much at all in fact what actually in in our case hurt the popularity of tweets both before and
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after the debate um and just kind of building on what we've been saying like
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being being everything being so Sensational and not being the most popular stuff um uh like it's it was
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especially clear afterwards so for example beforehand one thing that actually did stir some interest was the
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economy when people some people did tweet about the economy but afterwards it was just nothing there was just no no
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substantial policy not even policy that was popular during the debate um this was so it was a bit almost surprisingly
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sad that Twitter you might expect that Twitter is finally the way for everyone to debate
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and argue and and maybe get an understanding of of the issues but actually everyone towards the end was
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focused more on Sensations which means maybe Twitter is not the place you want to look at and kind of understand what
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is important in this election at at least in terms of the issues so how is your research different from prior work
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in this area um so so research is different on both methodology and a bit on findings so methodology it's
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interesting because we looked both at who tweets and who retweets and who gets gets followed by whom but also we looked
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at the sentiment and the topic of the tweets so this is one methodology difference and another one is the
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setting most people that analyzed uh tweets were looking at you know are people tweeting more about uh pop
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culture versus music or something like that if it's an event which is very active and you get more than 200 tweets
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a m a second right a second then there's this fight for attention and everyone is
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trying to say something this creates a very different Dynamic um and we think this is very unique because no one has
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has previously analyzed Tweets in a very short period of time in a very um kind of energetic active uh event so how will
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you follow up this research so building on what Ron just said we we or others might hope to um analyze other similar
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situations such as um sports or um any any other situation where it's very highly focused not over a long period of
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time um another area of focus we're interested in is um this the phenomenon of a lot of tweets being picked up by
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this by different users and what we mean by that is not just that something is retweeted but is is tweeted like not a
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retweet an original tweet um as opposed to just being like a very popular tweet like someone says something funny and
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everyone thinks it's hilarious and retweets so one example is is um quotes So sometimes a quote is so
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instantaneously interesting that everyone picks it up and just to give you one example from the debate U Mike
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hucke in one of the debates said um uh the purpose of the military is to kill people and break things and and this was
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retweeted this was tweeted excuse me not retweeted tweeted out by just over a 100
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people just immediately people were thought this was fascinating it actually wasn't that popular of of an idea like
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it didn't um last for ages and ages afterwards but it was initially very popular as opposed to this some quotes
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are only interesting because they get brought up by a person in context so actually in the same example um Pat and
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oswal um tweeted out um kill people and break things Mike Cooke just described the GOP and that itself is a very
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popular tweet and there are definitely some quotes that get picked up in that way just someone someone gives them more
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context that becomes super popular or sometimes just the quote itself just goes on and that's not the only thing we
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have um you know token tweets like who won is of course very popular but but it's it's interesting to see that in
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certain circumstances some tweets are either completely ignored of course some are picked up because one one user
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tweets something funny and that gets retweet a lot and sometimes just one idea or one moment who just gets picked
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up so much like I guess another moment that was a big deal was um uh the debate between Rubio and Trump's uh who had the
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bigger uh hands so to speak so these are and the other thing we didn't analyze so this was um a
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debate where people were trying to VI for the Republican nominations so these are not opposing ideas or issues this is
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just who gets the most attention we also have data from um the the primary debates right between Hillary Clinton
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and Donald Trump and I think it would be very interesting to understand if you had the same phenomenons and the same
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patterns there and would it be would have have been able to allow you to predict maybe who's going to win or or
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do issues matter or Sensations matter more and basically applying the same findings from this research to another
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data set to see if you get the same things does it generalize or is it very very specific well we can't wait to find
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out what you discover in your new research but thank you very much for joining us today thank you very much d
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