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Twitter Users Are Associating The Coronavirus With President Trump. Here’s The Data To Prove It

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This article is more than 4 years old.

One of the most interesting analytics exercises on social media is when you can correlate two distinct concepts and see how they are linked.

I’m talking about more than Kylie Jenner and make-up. A trending topic, a new hashtag, keyword searches, and web links all tell an interesting story when there is one topic way over here (I’m putting my left hand far to the left) and here (right hand to the right).

Recently, analytics reports generated by the social media management platform HootSuite and also Brandwatch reveal an interesting finding in the United States:

Twitter users are linking the coronavirus to President Trump.

Now, they are not quite saying he caused the pandemic. However, when you have an inkling about something — that perhaps the U.S. has been slow to respond or that the official information is cloudy — you can explore trends in data analytics on social media to find out what the mass populace thinks. And I mean mass.

Just in the last 30 days, 19 million people have mentioned the virus on Twitter alone, not to mention ongoing discussions on other platforms, according to HootSuite. The trending hashtag #trumpvirus has appeared over 93,000 times.

Since January 1 of this year, some 8,910,646 users have mentioned the coronavirus and President Trump in the same post, according to Brandwatch. They claim that 88% of the mentions on social media were negative, the rest are positive.

This is interesting to me for several reasons. By the way, none of them are political in nature.

For starters, we tend to look for scapegoats. Something must have caused this. (In truth, we don’t really know what caused the virus although we do know the epicenter.) Someone must be to blame. (That’s ridiculous because a pathogen can infect anyone at anytime and is not selective in terms of political persuasion, ethnicity, or any other reason.)

I’m not faulting anyone as a “blamethrower” — especially on Twitter. It’s a normal human response to look for a culprit. It helps us process world-altering events. You could argue that Hitler is to blame for World War II even though that is an incredible oversimplification — there were a lot of bad actors. However, what is different now is that social media allows experts to see actual data trends.

Brandwatch also noted trends where people mentioned Trump and the stock market in a negative way, then added comments about the virus.

I’m not personally blaming Trump. My position is clear — this is a deadly virus that is extremely difficult to contain, and blaming any single person for the infection rate or mortality rate is ludicrous. Scientists do not even know why the virus infects elderly people more than young people yet. They don’t really know what caused it. How could they name a suspect?

At the same time, I will say this: I understand the confusion. I view social media as a platform where voices can be heard and where gripes are allowed. It’s almost completely anonymous (all you need to create a Twitter account is an email and a phone number). I hate trolls as much as anyone.

Yet, as a journalist, I am also a radical proponent of free speech.

In recent years, we’ve at least been able to attach some data to the speech.

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