Social Network Analysis Project Post

For our Social Network Analysis project, we decided to use the Twitter hashtag, #saferthanatrumprally. This hashtag was trending on Facebook news on the “trending” sidebar, and said that “a new hashtag #saferthanatrumprally is trending on Twitter”. This seemed like a perfect trend to follow for this project. Besides, who doesn’t like nasty politics? We were hoping to learn who was using this hashtag, if there was any common theme of things that were “safer than a Trump rally”, and perhaps if there were any other people in politics who were perpetuating this trend.

This first interesting thing that we found was that at the time we started this project and were deciding on a topic, there were thousands of tweets with this hashtag. We accidentally deleted our information a week later, and we downloaded a new data set of the same hashtag. This time, it only yielded 161 tweets. We decided to continue anyway, because this was actually an interesting find. This raised some questions about how effective are these types of social media trends as political jabs. This was actually really interesting, as we learned how short-lived these types of quick and dirty political jabs are. Within a week the tag went from blowing up in the thousands to a little over 100.

Another interesting thing that we found was that the blossom coming off from the side was:

@tjwharry: This refreshing glass of Flint ice water. #SaferThanATrumpRally https://t.co/ci67MbNYqg

which was re-tweeted a bunch of times.

This shows the outrage of the Flint water crisis, as well. Trump didn’t have a hand in this, but the fact that his name is linked to images like this uses rhetoric that adds quite a jab at him. This stems another big issue in our country today. We also were forced to ask ourselves what that means for the presidential candidate.

Some commonalities found in the tweets were the fact that every tweet with this hashtag seemed to call attention to Donald Trump as well as another political or current events issue that the Twitter user seemed to think needed attention (ex. Marijuana, Flint Water, NYGOP, Democrats, etc.). The hashtag was used to imply that these issues were dangerous and to call attention to them, but was done so with a comedic cloak. Instead of providing a political rant, it was instead seen as a clever remark. Very few of them did not have to do with something important, but as with all data there were outliers such as “This wedding is not #saferthanatrumprally” or “going hunting with dick chaney #saferthanatrumprally”. Some of them just used something comically dangerous but unrelated to current events to emphasize the hashtag.