Hillary Clinton is a ____: The Internet Speaks

Methodology

Our methodology for this post differs very slightly from the Trump post but much of our setup was the same.

The team looked at Twitter mentions of “Hillary Clinton (or hillaryclinton) is a” between 16th – 23rd August. Accounts tweeting the same message in excess of 20 times (spam) were removed, as were retweets, leaving us with 1,388 instances to analyze.

The team then took the first 35 characters following those search strings and identified the words mentioned most frequently using an online word counting app. The remaining data included raw mentions of “hillary clinton/hillaryclinton is a” in tweets, including anything from tweeted news headlines to general musings.

Since mention volumes were much lower than last week’s Trump data looking at a similar discussion, in the case of the Clinton data we included adjectives as well as nouns (in Trump’s case we only used nouns and words that could be interpreted as nouns or adjectives, e.g. racist, American).

“Hillary Clinton is a bigot”

This chart shows the top mentioned words used to describe Hillary Clinton on Twitter.

“Bigot,” it seems, is on top.

It won’t be surprising to most to find that Donald Trump had a helping hand in this being the case. Many of the “bigot” tweets were quoting the man himself.

Trump to African American Voters: Hillary Clinton Is a Bigot https://t.co/IQ8H2X2ghA

— toppertaco (@toppertaco) August 17, 2016

Trump’s insistence on calling Clinton “Crooked Hillary” has definitely started to feed into descriptions of Clinton with “crook” making the list further down.

Second on the list was “liar”, with “lying” fourth. Some people put it into poetry.

#BadPoetryDay
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Hillary Clinton is a LIAR pic.twitter.com/lFaNVERpDt

— Jason Washam (@Washiepoo187) August 18, 2016

Beyond the common terms used to describe Clinton we also found some fairly niche ones.

Hillary clinton is a lizard

— cash emoji (@atdeancolistra) August 23, 2016

Key differences with Trump

Perhaps the most striking difference between Hillary and Donald’s mentions is the volume. Trump has consistently garnered more mentions than his competitors throughout the race (be they good or bad) and has made a huge mark on the conversation. One of the top mentioned terms across discussion of the two candidates is “Crooked Hillary”, a nickname he has repeatedly propagated on Twitter.

I think that both candidates, Crooked Hillary and myself, should release detailed medical records. I have no problem in doing so! Hillary?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2016

Another difference was the prominence of descriptors that refer to the candidates’ gender. For Trump, “man” was third on the list. For Hillary, “woman” came much further down and had a much much lower volume. “Bitch” also registered in Clinton’s top 20 used terms, ahead of “candidate” and “human”, a name that was found much further down Trump’s list with only 14 mentions.

In both cases people were more likely to tweet the candidates’ full name than their Twitter handle when describing them (perhaps for fear of one of them actually replying and feeling the wrath of thousands of supporters).

Who comes out on top? Well, neither Trump nor Hillary have many positive words in their charts and while Trump has slightly more positive/neutral terms in his top 20 he also received a whole lot more mentions, meaning a whole lot more negativity.

While both sets of research analyzed data over seven-day periods (with a one day difference), looking at mentions over the last three months they’ve had a fairly balanced sentiment score between them.

Let’s call it a tie.

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