As we all know, Trump’s appeal to the public is his unpolished, unapologetic public image. And his Twitter account is integral to this.
The Republican presidential candidate is no stranger to causing controversy through tweets, and he’s dominated media coverage for it. But he also uses the social media platform to show support, respond to fans and support his campaign.
Seems like normal Twitter activity for a political figure whose got a short temper, right? Not quite.
Two data scientists may have just uncovered something dark and terrifying at work here.
Turns out, all of Trump’s nice tweets come from an iPhone, and all of his outbursts come from an Android. Basically, the theory is that Trump only writes the hyperbolic, bullying, and quasi-fascistic tweets. Everything else is written by staff.
On Saturday, a guy named Todd Vaziri proposed this.
Vaziri explained on Storify that he used Tweetbot to divide tweets coming from Trump’s official Twitter account into those sent from Android and those from iPhone.
The difference in tone between tweets were markedly noticeable. Ones from iPhones usually contained pictures, were written in complete sentences and rarely contained ALL-CAPS. The ones from his Android, on the other hand, were usually angry, hyperbolic tweets, usually directed at his opponents.
For example, from an iPhone:
And from an Android:
Vaziri’s conclusion is that Trump himself is tweeting from his Android device, and his staff is tweeting from iPhones.
And David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow found further information to back up this theory.
First of all, Trump does tweet from an Android, a Samsung Galaxy to be exact. And according to Robinson, the data sets behind Trump’s twitter feed show that the differences between Trump’s two different types of tweets go beyond just tone.
Android tweets are usually sent in the morning, and iPhone tweets are sent in the afternoon and evening. Android tweets also manually copy and paste other people’s tweets to quote them, while iPhone tweets didn’t.
Robinson also found that words such as ‘crazy’, ‘weak’ and ‘badly’ were used most from the Android phone, compared to words sent from the iPhone like ‘correct’ ‘#trumptrain’ and ‘#supertuesday’.
If you connect the dots, the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be promote announcements with pictures and lots of hashtags – a skill media-savvy staff would have.
Ultimately, Robinson backed Vaziri in saying that, more likely than not, Trump writes the nasty tweets himself, while his staff write the more straight laced ones.
For a guy who’s running for President of the United States, this is fucking worrying. If Robinson and Vaziri are right, Trump’s not even capable of writing a nice tweet.
