![]() New mechanisms for information sharing have consequences for contagion: rapid spreading of content through a user-base capable of responding in real-time. With its introduction in the 2000s, social media provided a new platform for direct communication. Communication technology has especially accelerated the ability for presidents to “go public” and make appeals directly and instantly to the electorate. Kennedy, we now find ourselves in the era of social media campaigns and presidencies. Moving from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats through the television addresses of Harry Truman and John F. ![]() The ability for US presidents to communicate directly with the public changed dramatically during the 20th and early 21st centuries. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. ![]() Our program at-large receives support from MassMutual and Google, although neither organization specifically funded this study. Neither funder had any role in the design of the study or presentation of its results.Ĭompeting interests: JRM, TA, CMD, and PSD have been supported by a gift from MassMutual. received funding from the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company and Google Open Source under the Open-Source Complex Ecosystems And Networks (OCEAN) project. Those looking to replicate these results could either use a 10% historical collection or the Twitter API to query retweets and replies pertaining to specific users.įunding: P.S.D. We have also provided the IDs of the replies and retweets necessary to replicate our findings in a public repository ( ). While Twitter’s API terms of service will not allow us to share the individual messages we used, we used Twitter’s gardenhose stream to provide a 10% random sample of tweets, from which we selected tweets relating to the accounts of interest. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The data associated with this study can be downloaded from Twitter’s public API ( ). Received: AugAccepted: MaPublished: April 14, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Minot et al. These results suggest Trump’s Twitter posts are more often controversial and subject to enduring engagement as a given news cycle unfolds.Ĭitation: Minot JR, Arnold MV, Alshaabi T, Danforth CM, Dodds PS (2021) Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter. Finally, we find that Barack Obama consistently received a higher retweet-to-reply ratio than Donald Trump. For the Trump account, we find words related to fake news and the Mueller inquiry are more common in tweets with a high number of replies relative to retweets. We find that raw activity counts increase during the period leading up to the 2016 election, accompanied by a regime change in the ratio of retweets-to-replies connected to the transition between campaigning and governing. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as “ratios”, and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. ![]() On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump.
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