Obama 2009 Tweets and #tcot

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010

I've taken another look at the set of tweets from 2009 that contain 'Obama'. This time I started by focusing on the most popular hashtags that were used. This graph shows the top 10 hashtags, their distribution over the course of 2009, and the total references to them. The top hashtag by far was #tcot which stands for 'Top Conservatives on Twitter'.

How do tweets that contain #tcot differ from those that don't have it? What words seem especially associated with the tag? What topics do people using the tag seem to be focusing on?

I've done an analysis on the word frequency inside tweets containing the tag versus tweets without it. This chart below shows the words that are used much more frequently in the #tcot tweets compared to the baseline. Words on the left like 'CARE' and 'BUSH' are used at a rate of around 100-120% of the baseline rate. Words on the right like 'BHO' (shorthand for Barack Hussein Obama) and 'RASMUSSEN' are used around 500% of the baseline rate - or, in other words, they occur around five times as often in #tcot tweets as they do in non-#tcot tweets.

The chart is an interesting collection of terms and is an attempt at distilling what the people who use the tag #tcot are saying in relation to Obama. Some notable words in the set are 'DANGEROUS', 'SOCIALIZED', 'EXPOSE', 'RADICALS', 'ARROGANT', 'MARXIST', 'COMMUNIST', 'CLIMATEGATE'.

 


Tweets About Obama in 2009
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