A data scientist has analysed Donald Trump's Twitter feed and shown a reliable way to tell which tweets were sent by the controversial US presidential hopeful himself, and which were sent by a member of his staff.
Or, rather, he has crunched data to prove what many of us already suspected: the angry, outrageous and insulting tweets are from Trump.
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Fifty Republicans warn of 'dangerous' Trump
Prominent Republican national security officials, including a former CIA director, have issued a statement saying party nominee Donald Trump would be "the most reckless president in American history."
A while ago, there was a change in Trump's Twitter behaviour.
Previously famous for its rambling, misspelled and sensational outbursts (often in all caps), Trump's official account become tamer as the prospect of his being a real contender for the presidency came closer.
The account has since become somewhat of a mixed bag, oscillating between benign political statements ("Thank you Abingdon, Virginia!") and a semblance of its former self ("Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails").
David Robinson, who works at the programming community and education company Stack Overflow, was intrigued by a theory circulating online that any tweet sent from an Android phone was from Trump himself, while those of his staffer came from an iPhone. At a glance the theory seems to hold water. Gawker even made a Twitter bot that copied only Trump tweets from Android to filter out all the positive mush. But could it be proven?
Every non-hyperbolic tweet is from iPhone (his staff).
— Todd Vaziri (@tvaziri) August 6, 2016
Every hyperbolic tweet is from Android (from him). pic.twitter.com/GWr6D8h5ed
After pulling the data from Twitter and separating the Android tweets from the iPhone's, Robinson's analysis concluded that the two streams were "clearly from different people", each using its own patterns of language, retweets, pictures and hashtags.
"What's more, we can see that the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be benign announcements and pictures," Robinson noted.
Trump has been seen to use a Samsung Galaxy Android phone for tweeting.
Tweets from Trump tended to be earlier in the day, rarely included images or video and quoted people by copying and pasting their words with quotation marks rather than retweeting them.
The staffer's tweets tended to use hashtags featuring the campaign's slogans.
The two lists of tweets also used very different terms, with emotionally charged words such as "crazy", "weak" and "dumb" much more common in tweets sent from the Android phone.
Robinson even quantified the difference in sentiment between the two sets, and concluded that "Trump's Android account uses about 40-80% more words related to disgust, sadness, fear, anger, and other 'negative' sentiments than the iPhone account does".
Interestingly, Robinson also highlighted some tweets that came from the iPhone but attempted to copy Trump's style:
Failing @NYTimes will always take a good story about me and make it bad. Every article is unfair and biased. Very sad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 20, 2016
Either Trump occasionally switches phones to send a tweet, or there's an unfortunate staffer out there whose job it is to filter politically advantageous messages through a version of Trump's combative and denigrating style.
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