Les sciences dorées

What people are sharing on Trump’s facebook site…

Ever wondered what people discuss and share on president elect Donald Trump’s official facebook site? We used facebook’s Graph Api to extract all comments people left under his posts from January 2014 to the week he got elected in November 2016. In total we harvested more than 10 million comments.

With the help of R’s stringi packet and the wonderful str_extract we were able to  filter out all links posted in comments.

The share of links is surprisingly small. In total we identified 390105 comments, which included some sort of link.

Using again str_extract we extracted now from the URLs the domain part and used R’s table function to get the frequency for each domain. So, what’s your guess? Which site was number1? I bet my money of course on Breitbart. However, the redneck site turns out to be overtaken by all social media efforts. Breitbart is “only” number 3 of the most shared sites. The highly discussed alt-right platform needs to share the podium with Facebook (2) and Youtube (1). In addition the gap between the two social media sites and Breitbart is remarkably large, with Breitbart receiving approx. 20x less shares than facebook or youtube.  Gofundme a crowdfunding site for person based campaigns is taking the wooden medal. Only then traditional media comes in with the Washingtonpost taking place 5, followed by all sorts of other traditional media outlets like CNN, Fox, and others. Huffingtonpost and Politico both more associated with the democratic and liberal voters take places 9 and 10 highlighting the intense debate between Trump and Clinton supporters.

Table1: Top 10 Shared Sites in Comments on Donald Trump’s facebook site

#	Domain	Times_Shared
1	Youtube	79581
2	facebook	73614
3	Breitbart	4539
4	gofundme	4108
5	WashingtonPost	3607
6	CNN	2803
7	NY Times	2718
8	foxnews	2308
9	huffingtonpost	2176
10	politico	1676

Although this gives us some ideas about what kind of content is shared, it would be interesting to get a deeper idea of what exact content is shared. No problem, we can use R’s wonderful dplyr package to use filter and grepl to extract all comments, which contain a URL with one of the Top10 domains.

Table2: Top 10 Shared Youtube Videos in Comments on Donald Trump’s facebook site

#	Link	Frequency
1	https://youtu.be/5IuJGHuIkzY	1021
2	https://youtu.be/hDc8PVCvfKs	389
3	https://youtu.be/WKYmiWiNqOw	249
4	https://youtu.be/kypl1MYuKDY	229
5	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5BtQgTGOI4	196
6	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hr37eE0nO8	183
7	https://youtu.be/EEQvsK5w-jY	180
8	https://youtu.be/jUDTcxIqqM0	178
9	https://youtu.be/GyLkg3uDe1c	166
10	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP6S3KE2DaI	157

Ever wondered what these videos are about? Well places 1-3 are taken by some weird documentation trying to proove how Hillary is rigging the elections.

Number 4 is another intriguing documentary about baby eating Hillary with more than 15 million views since its upload in November 2015.

But don’t worry. Supporters are not fixed on Hillary Clinton. Obama, McCain, Muslims and Mexicans, the youtube videos provide every sort of stereotype and rumor about anything alt-right people don’t like…

It seems like Youtube is the weapon of choice for Trump supporters. But how is it with facebook? What are the Top10 facebook pages and groups, which were shared in the comments? Well, you can be the most powerful man in history, the most successful leader of all, the big and the lebowski, the greatest and so on… Some Cypriotic kids will still come and spam your site with some advertising for their RunInColour movement in Cyprus.

Unfortunately the second most shared group is no longer available. We can thus only speculate about the content.  Number 4 is about a documentary’s website that related Trump with America’s growing Neo Nazi movement. His own campaign only secures places 6 to 10with content from the official facebook site and some unofficial supporter sites.

Table3: Top 10 Shared facebook groups/sites in Comments on Donald Trump’s facebook site

#	Link	Frequency
1	https://www.facebook.com/RuninColour/	496
2	https://www.facebook.com/groups/508373062658237/	200
3	https://m.facebook.com/NicoleGattiOficial	158
4	https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwatchingthewheelsdad.net%2F2015%2F08%2F24%2Fdonald-trump-is-the-new-face-of-white-supremacy-says-hate-crime-expert%2F&h=cAQHDSJSV	146
5	https://www.facebook.com/G.honte/	144
6	https://www.facebook.com/groups/DonaldTrumpCampaign/	127
7	https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump?fref=nf	126
8	https://www.facebook.com/MarchForAmerica2016/	120
9	https://www.facebook.com/gamersboulevard/	112
10	https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump2016Support/	110

So it turns out that facebook is more for the Anti-Trumps. Obviously this won’t be the case for Breitbart content. Below we share the top 10 of articles shared from Breitbart.

Table4: Top 10 Shared Breitbart stories in Comments on Donald Trump’s facebook site 

#	Link	Frequency
1	http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/26/anti-trump-network-fox-news-money-flows-open-borders-group/	97
2	http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/	69
3	http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/19/poll-won-third-presidential-debate/	47
4	http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/18/flashback-jeb-bush-admitted-leaky-immigration-led-911/	45
5	http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/28/trump-pushes-single-payer-healthcare-tax-increase-on-wealthy/	38
6	http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/01/26/2868743/	37
7	http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/16/carly-fiorina-hp-sold-millions-dollars-products-iran/	35
8	http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/24/is-donald-trump-conservative-heres-the-rundown/	33
9	http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/12/02/trump-100-vindicated-cbs-reports-swarms-on-roofs-celebrating-911/	30
10	http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/28/trump-campaign-manager-exposes-that-fox-news-executive-in-charge-of-debates-has-daughter-working-for-marco-rubio/	28

It turns out that Trumps’ supporters’ anger is not only focused on Hillary and the Democrats but anything that dares to oppose to Trump. Striking to see however, that all top10 articles have been directly shared less than a 100 times. Given that Breitbart enjoyed more than 4000 shared links, this indicates the high heterogeneity within topic preferences across Trump supporters.

So what are the top stories in other media? Check belows table to find the respective links and stories. Hope you enjoyed this. Digging through this gold mine of data still feels like flying with Kirk’s earliest version of the Enterprise discovering each day new species and insights.