Trump vs. Hillary Analyzing Viral Tweets during US Presidential Elections 2016

TL;DR

This study analyzes viral tweets during the 2016 US presidential election, revealing that pro-Trump tweets generally received more retweets, with notable spikes following key events, highlighting social media's influence on political discourse.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of viral tweets, focusing on retweet patterns and political bias during the 2016 election.

Findings

Pro-Trump tweets were retweeted more than pro-Clinton tweets overall.

Significant spikes in pro-Trump tweet volume occurred after key events.

Viral tweet activity was highly concentrated on specific days, especially after debates and scandals.

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a quantitative and qualitative analyses of the viral tweets related to the US presidential election. In our study, we focus on analyzing the most retweeted 50 tweets for everyday during September and October 2016. The resulting set is composed 3,050 viral tweets, and they were retweeted over 20.5 million times. We manually annotated the tweets as favorable of Trump, Clinton, or neither. Our quantitative study shows that tweets favoring Trump were usually retweeted more than pro-Clinton tweets, with the exception of a few days in September and two days in October, especially the day following the first presidential debate and following the release of the Access Hollywood tape. On two days in October 2016, pro-Trump tweet volume accounted for than 90\% of the total tweet volume.