Interact with the @realDonaldTrump Twitter Timeline, January 2020–2021

Post Mortem of @realDonaldTrump
2 min readFeb 11, 2021

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Our research team at the University of Colorado Boulder has launched a series of posts that reveal how influential the @realDonaldTrump account was leading up to and during the 45th US Presidency. Like no other person online, this account had tremendous impact on not just its 88M followers — but also on the online information environment in the large.

This post is the third in a series we are running in winter/spring 2021.

In light of the February impeachment trial happening at the time of this writing, and the inclusion of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets in the case made by the House Impeachment Managers, we are releasing a beta version of an interactive tweet visualization tool.

We encourage readers to engage with @realDonaldTrump’s tweets directly to appreciate the volume, frequency, and intensity.

Interacting with a scatterplot displaying tweets and retweets by Trump during 2020–2021 in different colors to show different features (deletion, flagged, word use).
Figure 1. Click here for an interactive version of the @realDonaldTrump Tweet Explorer

This interactive tool is rendered with Plotly. Each symbol on the chart represents a tweet or retweet, including deleted and flagged tweets. Hover the cursor over one of these symbols to see the content, date, and time of each tweet or retweet. A toolbar in the upper-right corner allows the user to choose different interactive methods, such as panning or zooming. The legend offers more data layers for customized viewing — a set of data layers that we will continue to develop and release as we go. Tweets in this particular display were drawn from The Trump Archive.

In this blog series, we will continue to offer a mix of descriptive reporting, interactive tools, and deeper analysis of the social media record of @realDonaldTrump as the weeks go on. Our primary goal tonight is to get the data in front of readers as soon as possible for personal consideration.

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Post Mortem of @realDonaldTrump
Post Mortem of @realDonaldTrump

Written by Post Mortem of @realDonaldTrump

University of Colorado information scientists reporting on the influence of the 45th US President’s defunct Twitter platform

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