Is Trump's Campaign Locking Him Out of Twitter?

Is Trump's Campaign Locking Him Out of Twitter?

by Andrew McGill at the Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/donald-trump-twitter-iphone-android/495239/

"SNIP............


Most juicily, the Android phone—oh, let’s just call it “Trump”—is much, much angrier. By Robinson’s calculations, it uses 40-80 percent more negative words in tweets than the iPhone, including Trump mainstays like “badly,” “crazy,” and “weak.” Tweets from that device frequently evoke sadness, fear, anger, and disgust, according to Robinson’s language processing, while the iPhone is more likely to express anticipation, trust and joy.

Plus, the iPhone tweets out event times. That’s a staffer job. C’mon.

So I got curious. If tweets from the Android phone represent Trump’s contributions to his Twitter account, and the iPhone signals his staff’s input, how much is the New York billionaire actually tweeting these days? As the stakes grow higher—and flubs more damaging—has Trump’s campaign locked him out of his account for his own safety?

To figure this out, I needed to grab as many of Trump’s tweets as I could, preferably from the start of his campaign. Turns out this is pretty hard: Twitter clamps down on your ability to download tweets programmatically after 3,000 or so, which only took me back to December. I gave the social media company a call, but was told it would probably cost thousands to extract the data I needed.

So I turned to Oren Tsur, a visiting scholar at Harvard and associate professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He’s written about Trump’s Twitter account before and has been scraping the candidate’s tweets since 2015. With his help, I scanned his archive and matched it with more current data—resulting in some 6,000 tweets—and counted the number of times @RealDonaldTrump tweeted from each device, grouping by month. If you convert each month to a percentage, you get this:


.............SNIP"