It’s no secret Donald Trump is a prolific tweeter. His aggressive use of the social media platform is one of the many things that have distinguished his unique candidacy.
That being the case, we decided to analyze the past six months of Trump’s tweets to see what they could tell us about the frequency with which he tweets, whether he writes a lot of the tweets himself and what time of day he is taking to the social media site. We also wanted to dig into the topics he tweets about and the style he uses. And, yes, we wanted to see if we could learn something about the man himself.
The best way to digest Trump’s tweeting ferocity is to compare it to someone else, so — surprise, surprise — we chose Hillary Clinton. The comparison shows that Trump actually tweets significantly less overall than Clinton, but he does it more consistently. Also, if you look closely, you’ll notice that Trump’s account tweets at times when Clinton’s never does. In the past six months, Clinton has never tweeted between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. and rarely tweeted between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m., leaving the Twitterverse wide open to Trump.
So we dug into this a bit more using the much-reported theory that two people are responsible for Trump’s tweets — Trump himself on an Android phone and somebody – maybe a campaign staffer — on an iPhone. Click here to see DecodeDC's the chart that shows the distinct patterns for when each phone was used to tweet in the past six months, adding to the evidence that they are used by two different people.
Note: Because Clinton’s tweets don’t exhibit a similar time-of-day disparity between devices, we couldn’t make a determination about who was behind a tweet – so we chose to just focus on Trump here.
