the seven types of people who tweet at trump...

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1

TypesofPeopleWhoTweetatTrump

BloombergBusinessweek 5

The Seven Types of People Who Tweet at Trump https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-who-re...

1 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

love Twitter,” Donald Trump once tweeted. That love is manifest in more than 34,000

tweets since he took up the mantle @realDonaldTrump and over 350 in the weeks since

The SevenThe SevenThe SevenThe SevenThe SevenThe SevenTypes ofTypes ofTypes ofTypes ofTypes ofTypes of

People WhoPeople WhoPeople WhoPeople WhoPeople WhoPeople WhoTweet atTweet atTweet atTweet atTweet atTweet at

TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrump




2 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

of those are robots programmed to interact with @realDonaldTrump. What drives

anyone else to tweet at a president?

Trump’s 10 most-engaged Twitter followers over the past 30 days include five confirmed

robots and three accounts that appear to be bots, according to audience data collected by

Social Rank. Trump’s most prolific respondent, @Trump2016_Fan, has posted more

than 18,000 times in the past year, mostly all-caps messages of support for the 45th

president. The account appears to be automated and did not respond to a request for an

interview.

But there are plenty of humans in the 20,000 or so replies generated by a typical Trump

tweet. These are piled like building blocks beneath each tweet, a tower of typos, insults,

and encouragement that stretches on and on. Scrolling through the replies to a single

Trump message is enough to test the fortitude of any reader; getting to the last reply is

the sort of task it's hard to imagine any human doing voluntarily. Yet the replies bundled

nearest to @realDonaldTrump—in a sorting determined by Twitter’s mysterious

algorithm—are likely to be seen by hundreds of thousands of users. If Trump is the most

powerful and visible user of Twitter, the replies appearing closest to his messages must

occupy some of the most influential real estate on the internet.

We set out to profile the lovers, haters, and robots that can be found in the replies to

@realDonaldTrump to understand their motivations. Most, but not all, of the individuals

interviewed are men. According to beta content-analysis software used by Social Rank,

19 percent of Trump’s followers are women. Among Trump’s 20 most-engaged followers,

only two had traditionally female names—and both of those accounts appear to be

automated.




3 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

Bots are a rampant part of life on

Twitter. Some are programmed to

emulate email spam and proliferate

marketing links, while others respond

to common typos or transmit every

word in the dictionary. Then there are

bots, such as @EveryTrumpDonor

and @ConstBot, whose jobs largely

consist of broadcasting messages at

the president of the United States.

Adam Kraft, the 42-year-old

programmer behind

@EveryTrumpDonor, gave it two

operating instructions: Mention

Trump's Twitter account every hour

and reply to his tweets twice a day.

Kraft's bot has so far posted more than

15,000 tweets, all of which provide

information about Trump’s donors.

Kraft, a self-identified liberal, started

out with an interest in campaign

finance reform and government

transparency. He found a public data

stream released by the Federal

Election Commission that reveals the

names, occupations, locations, and

contribution amounts of political

donors. This became the animating

force behind @EveryGOPDonor and

@EveryDemDonor, bots whose only




4 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




5 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

Scott Presler has been tweeting at

President Trump for months. He

targets Attorney General Jeff

Sessions, too, as well as White House

adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Sometimes, figures from the Trump

administration even tweet back at the

conservative political operative.

Presler, the 28-year-old field

operations coordinator at ACT for

America, a political group focused on

national security, had 10,000

followers on Twitter a year ago; now

@ScottPresler has more than 76,000

followers. A photograph of Presler and

two friends holding a Gays for Trump

poster was retweeted by General

Michael Flynn, the former national

security adviser who resigned in

February. Conway even replied to a

Presler tweet by tweeting, “God bless

you all.”

“I’m pretty good at marketing myself

on Twitter,” Presler said in a phone

interview. “It’s using trending

hashtags, replying to President Trump

and top people.”

His time spent on Twitter is, in part,

an extension of his work as a political




6 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




7 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

Christoph Rehage, 35, is one of the

very Twitter users who annoy

@TylerDoor. “Be honest, your mental

template on Trump is no matter what

he does, it's wrong,” @TylerDoor

tweeted to @crehage earlier this

week. “If you think he a villain [sic],

you’ll see fault everywhere.”

Rehage, a writer who splits his time

between Germany and Central Asia,

claims the distinction of having been

banned from Chinese social media for

his satirical posts about politics there.

Now he's engaging with

@realDonaldTrump, whom he

disdains.

“I don’t have much to do during the

day,” he said. “I’ve kind of figured out

the time he gets online to do his tweet

thing.” Rehage is typically quick on

the trigger when @realDonaldTrump

pops up with a new message, and he

threads his replies together to form a

longer string of messages.” I try not to

use any profanity, not insult

anybody," Rehage said. “I try to

expose a little bit of Donald Trump’s

rhetoric and his way of thinking, the

logical fallacies.”




8 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




9 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

Susan DeSantis is retired, her town in

rural Pennsylvania is home to about

2,000 people, and her tweets are full

of bright blue hashtags that signify

the causes she cares about. The

62-year-old has tweeted at President

Trump about 500 times under the

name @Santis1De since late

February.

Most of DeSantis’s output originates

at her kitchen table, where she works

for a few hours at a time on Twitter

and Facebook as a volunteer on the

"social media sharing team" for

Revolution Truth, a nonprofit activist

organization concerned with

democratic governance. DeSantis

identifies as an independent, and

she's relatively new to Twitter, with

only a handful of followers. Still,

SocialRank metrics put her among the

elite at interacting with

@realDonaldTrump.

“I really had to laugh because, quite

honestly, I had done a few tweets, I

didn’t even really know that much

about it,” she said of her status among

Trump's biggest respondents. “I just

went full force with it. This has been

one of my first adventures as far as




10 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




11 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

The replies to President Trump’s

tweets are full of jokes, more than few

of which come from Kevin Dent.

It's quickly approaching that time of

the day where we play "What idiotic

tweet will Trump come up with

today?".

8:37 AM - 19 Mar 2017

Kevin@TheKevinDent

Follow

“I try not to sound like I’m angry,”

Dent said from his vacation home in

Croatia. “A lot of people on Twitter

just sound like they’re angry and

pissed off.”

After doing well in the video-game

industry, the 43-year-old Dent mostly

retired and took up Twitter between

golf rounds. He views tweeting jokes

in response to Trump as a sort of civic

duty, a way to possibly influence

persuadable voters. Dent identifies as

liberal. “I always found that you can

change someone’s mind with humor,

rather than shouting,” he said.

Dent believes his witticisms get

results, assigning himself the low (and




12 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




13 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

Ah, the egg account. These are named

after what for a decade—until last

week, in fact—was a default logo

assigned to users who had just

activated a Twitter account. Some of

these novices don't adopt a headshot

or other image in place of the

standard egg logo, and other users of

Twitter came to associate the egg with

all manner of aggressive and uncouth

behavior. The connection between egg

avatars and bad behavior was so

entrenched that Twitter this month

replaced the egg with a new design in

an attempt to break the association.

The eggs are also strongly associated

with @realDonaldTrump, although

this almost certainly reflects Trump’s

status as one of Twitter’s most

popular and visible users. Trump

boasts more than 7.5 million of these

eggs among his followers, according

to Social Rank. That’s about 28

percent of his total following.

“When you’re a big account, you add

eggs,” said Alexander Taub,

co-founder of Social Rank. There's

also a strong association between

inflated follower tallies and egg

accounts. Taub suspects that some




14 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




15 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

The woman behind @TwitlerTroll

started out as a Hillary Clinton

volunteer in Chicago. After Trump

won the election, “I kind of lost my

mind,” she said. “I started having

anxiety attacks, and I'm not that kind

of person in general. It's just been sort

of a release for me, to get my anger

out.” Tweeting, she explained, is her

“primal scream.”

These screams were answered back,

on occasion, by screams from the

other side. Trump supporters on

Twitter “would get pissy with me, and

I would get pissy right back.”

@TwitlerTroll requested anonymity

because she fears offline retaliation.

Venting on Twitter has helped, but

she is aware of how she has changed.

“I really have turned into a troll,

which in a way makes me feel bad, but

I'm only trolling people who deserve

it," she said. "I don't spend a lot of

time trolling him,” she said of Trump,

"but I do spend a decent amount of

time in conversations with people

trying to enlighten them.”

More than an hour spent as

@TwitlerTroll takes a psychological




16 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




17 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

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18 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM




19 of 19 04/16/2017 08:13 PM

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