"His tweets speak for themselves": An analysis of Donald Trump's Twitter behaviour
This is a conference paper. ; We explore President Donald Trump's tweeting habits and the effects they have on his followers and the American media. To gain a comprehensive picture of Trump's tweeting habits as President of the United States, we have undertaken a study of Trump's personal @realDonaldTrump Twitter account, focusing on his campaign, the transition period before his presidency, and first 200 days in office. We employ three state-ofthe-art computational tools to analyse sentiment, emotions and psycholinguistic features in Trump's tweets to decipher what it is about his communication methods that generates the highest responses and retweets. We find that during the first 200 days of presidency, an accusative tone of discourse was most frequently used by @realDonaldTrump, and among a number of significant emotional patterns, we observe an intriguing correlation in that the more negative the overall message of a tweet is, the more likely it is to be re-tweeted, favourited, and discussed in American mainstream media. We also used data from the recently released PTDC corpus (Political Twitter Discourse Corpus) consisting of 205,303 original tweets of all current US state governors, members of the US Senate, and members of Congress and found that Trump's tweeting style is significantly different along a central dimension of language on Twitter. Our findings suggest that the general public on Twitter respond more actively to negative and less analytic language, and in turn, the language on Twitter directed at Trump is highly emotional and often contains negative sentiment.