San Francisco: Only 22 percent of Americans actually use Twitter, but among them, those who disapprove of US President Donald Trump dominate the conversations on national politics on the social media platform says a new report from the Pew Research Center.
This group — those who disapprove of Trump — generates 80 percent of all tweets from US adults and 72 percent of tweets mentioning national politics, said the study released on Wednesday.
Those who strongly approve of Trump produce 11 percent of all tweets from US adults. They create 25 percent of tweets mentioning national politics.
Taken together, strong disapprovers and strong approvers of Trump generate 97 percent of all tweets mentioning national politics from US adults on Twitter.
The survey involved 2,427 respondents with public Twitter accounts. Collectively, the participants produced more than 1.1 million tweets over the course of the study period – June 10, 2018-June 9, 2019.
The Pew Research Center used a guided Machine Learning model to classify each of these 1.1 million tweets as related to national politics or not.
The prevalence of tweets mentioning national politics from US adults who strongly disapprove of Trump is tied to two factors.
First, this group makes up a larger share of Twitter users than of the general public. The share of US adults on Twitter who strongly disapprove of Trump (55 percent) is seven percentage points higher than the share of the general public that holds this view (48 percent).
Second, this group is more likely to tweet about national politics than others on Twitter.
By contrast, US adults who strongly approve of Trump are underrepresented on Twitter relative to their presence in the population as a whole – 15 percent of Twitter users strongly approve of Trump, compared with 29 percent of the general public, said the study.
Twitter users who strongly approve of Trump generate 25 percent of the political tweets that come from US adults – larger than the share of all Twitter users they represent (15 percent).
The results also showed that 97 percent of tweets from US adults that mentioned national politics over the study period came from just 10 percent of users.