One Wordcloud A Day

The big story has been about how the cast of Hamilton gave a small speech to Michael Pence, the vice president elect of the US. More on this story is available here: I decided to use a different type of wordcloud today. In order to test it, I used a much smaller corpus of tweets, just 2000. Here is the wordcloud  Clearly people are talking a lot about Pence and the cast but Trump shows up a lot too. This is because Trump decided to attack the cast on Twitter. The sentiment around this episode is unsurprisingly negative.

When I made a sentiment graph for #GE2015, which stands for General Elections 2015 in Singapore, I was surprised to see much more negative sentiment that I expected. I thought that the election would be very tight and the ruling party PAP will face major challenge from opposition parties. Yet, when the results were announced, PAP won the election with 70% vote share! The moral of the story is that in Singapore Twitter sentiment about politics is not representative of the voting population. I think that many Americans are hoping the same to be true for the USA. Super Tuesday was two days back on 1st March and the participating states included Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado (with caucuses), Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota (with caucuses), Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia. Additionally, Republican caucuses were held in Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#2016). Well, what do we have here? Trump is all over the wordcloud again...

Today there were two news about Sarah Palin. First, she endorsed Donald Trump for his Republican presidential bid. Second, her son Track Palin (yes, that's his name...really) was arrested for domestic violence . So I decided to use this opportunity to see which news is getting more traction on Twitter. To my surprise, Twitter doesn't care much about the son's arrest!It was Trump everywhere. However, there were a few tweets mentioning "son", "domestic", "violence", etc. The sentiment overall was highly neutral.

Donald Trump is trending for all the wrong reasons. Today he said that Americans should not allow Muslims to enter the country! That's outright demented. But anyway, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to understand what people on Twitter are saying about him. So I downloaded close to 200K tweets and created this wordcloud. Of course, all the talk is around his comments against Muslims. But it looks to me that this is more of chatter from news outlets retweeted by people. Later you will see that the sentiment around Trump is still not as negative as you would expect. Also the derogatory words "Hitler", "dick", and "racist" are quite infrequent.   Here is sentiment graph for Trump. It's surprisingly positive. What's going on Twitter?