Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 14;16(4):e0248880. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248880. eCollection 2021.
The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as "ratios", and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. We find that raw activity counts increase during the period leading up to the 2016 election, accompanied by a regime change in the ratio of retweets-to-replies connected to the transition between campaigning and governing. For the Trump account, we find words related to fake news and the Mueller inquiry are more common in tweets with a high number of replies relative to retweets. Finally, we find that Barack Obama consistently received a higher retweet-to-reply ratio than Donald Trump. These results suggest Trump's Twitter posts are more often controversial and subject to enduring engagement as a given news cycle unfolds.
过去十年，政治家们越来越多地使用社交媒体，其中最典型的例子是第 45 任美国总统唐纳德·特朗普。在 Twitter 上，特朗普总统的信息因其点赞、转发和回复的数量而一直受到高度关注。在这里，我们量化了这些活动的平衡，也称为“比率”，并将其作为对总统通讯的集体政治参与程度的代理进行研究。我们发现，在 2016 年选举之前的一段时间内，原始活动计数增加，同时伴随着转发与回复之间比率的变化，这与竞选和执政之间的过渡有关。对于特朗普的账户，我们发现与假新闻和穆勒调查相关的词语在回复与转发比率较高的推文中更为常见。最后，我们发现奥巴马的转推与回复比率一直高于特朗普。这些结果表明，特朗普的 Twitter 帖子更具争议性，并且在给定的新闻周期展开时更持久地受到关注。
