The President Didn’t Talk About Climate Change at the SOTU, But a Lot of You Did.
Watching Twitter Watch the State of the Union
This article is in three parts: 1.) Intro to Us 2.) Methodology 3.) Tweets!
> Intro to Us
We’re stating the obvious, we know, but the amount of information exchanged on the internet today is truly staggering — and increasing. In 2007, Twitter alone hosted about 5,000 tweets per day, but that ballooned to about 500,000,000 tweets per day in 2013, and now, up until the precise moment that we copied the LivesStat (which was within the 60 second duration of 10:43pm EST, 02/07/19), we collectively tweeted at least 684,519,969 times.
These numbers were pulled from InternetLiveStats.com. Want to see a visualization of just one second from their website? Go here.
Amazing, right? And that’s just Twitter.
For us, advancing our nonprofit missions at the Society Library, Internet Government, and Great American Debate means we have to be strategic in our information retrieval, and not just from Twitter, but sampling from all sources of information.
Let me explain, we’re a nonprofit organization that recognizes the abundance of information available on social and political issues, but sees access to that information as asymmetrical for many reasons. As a solution to this issue, we’re committed to bringing together data and ideas from all sides of persisting social and political debates and represent them in one platform; tinkering with the information architecture so we break debates down to their atomic arguments while also being able to display the “big picture” of the debate itself.
But before publishing that big picture, the information will have to be passed through a rigorous analysis process to identify important characteristics about each point, such as if they were logically fallacious or factually incorrect.
So, just like we have to have measures to check our biased interpretations during analysis, we also have to overcome the biases of the tools used to find information in the first place. To do this, we have to deploy certain methods for collection as well as cast a wide net (when we can) to pick up on online trends bubbling up that may not otherwise be easily discoverable.
Luckily, we have a few sympathetic friends who grant us access to their technology to make the work of casting a wide net online possible for us at this stage of our development. However, we still need to develop our own tools to perform at the standards we’re setting for our own analysis process, so we’re always on the lookout for opportunities to draw attention to the non-profit mission and fundraise. And so, the day before we read that the State of the Union date had been postponed to the 5th, we decided to launch a fundraising campaign to ride the hashtag wave for the State of the Union. With the speech delayed, that means we had a week.
We decided we would offer donors the choice between supporting an analysis on the debate about climate change vs. the debate about immigration policy (in particular, “The Wall”). If we raised the targeted amount, we could greatly expand and speed up the work we were performing, and offer the American public an interactive platform through which they could see all sides of one of these debates (in great detail). Climate change and immigration policy issues not only represent some of the most partisan and politically divisive topics facing the nation today, but it’s necessary to reach an understanding on the scope of the perceived threats of immigration-related issues and climate change in order to to inform meaningful policy
Our work is like hearing an internet court case on the issue, with tens of thousands witnesses, expert testimonials, lawyers, judges, and juries weighing in — made possible through structured processes. If the ideal of a court case is the discovery of right action given the examination of evidence through established procedures and record-keeping processes (including the prohibition of certain communications considered as upending to that ideal), then we could be compared to that. Suddenly, everyone could walk around with a data repository in their pocket to fact-check the nuances of any argument or position on the matter. We pitched it as “getting to the bottom of the debate.”
We had already begun work in collecting information, opinions, ideas, and data concerning the climate change debate in the United States, though it comes as a surprise to many that there is still a debate about it at all, and that may be because the topic itself doesn’t seem to be brought up often. One 2018 survey recently showed that even though the majority of Americans are worried about the effects of climate change, 65% say they “never” or “rarely” discuss the issue.
Why? Of those surveyed, (33%) of the respondents said it was because their friends and family already agree with them and (26%) said because the topic is too political. Too political, maybe, and politically polarized, too. As of 2016 (which is admittedly a long time ago in the information age), the disagreement over climate change’s existence, cause, and the perceived necessary actions to address it (according to this poll by Pew) has persisted along party lines, with significant differences in opinion being held on average by voters supporting either Trump or Clinton.
So why do these divides in opinion exist? What information, arguments, and ideas inform those opinions?
And can we verify the integrity of that information? What is the form of those arguments — are they fallacious? And where did those ideas originate from?
Our work entails discovering and mapping that intel for the public to view and have the opportunity to investigate and understand. We operate on the premise that the American public simply does not have access to the same information on important policy issues (although that’s due to a variety of reasons), which is why we need to take formal stock of the various, conflicting perspectives on these issues, and then examine them based on useful criteria before publishing in a public repository.
> Methodology
And like we said, in order to capture that information, we have to be strategic in our collection methods and, from time to time, we have to cast a wide net. So for the night of the SOTU, we asked our friends at IST Research for assistance. They had been working with us to collect public comments on climate change for months, but that campaign was ended to switch gears and focus on discussions around immigration and the State of the Union while we launched our non-profit fundraisers (which are still open campaigns). The work entailed our volunteers coming together for an outreach-a-thon on Twitter to share our (Alternative) State of the Union video and ask individuals to support either the climate change or immigration debate on our GoFundMe pages. The overall debate project is called Great American Debate.
Using Twitter’s streaming API, we could only get up to 1% of a streaming second of Twitter traffic. But by targeting small populations, we could capture nice snapshots of the information exchanges, and pick up on minor topics which may otherwise be underrepresented on the democratic internet. So we decided to cover the SOTU Twitter traffic, as well as monitor keywords on “The Wall” and “Immigration.” For this fundraising campaign, we decided to focus mostly on engaging users on Twitter, hoping our content would spread quickly.
We monitored 37 keywords and 13 hashtags through Twitter’s public streaming API, and although climate change wasn’t a keyword or hashtag on our list (we already had lists of climate change influencers on many sides of the argument who our volunteers would contact on SOTU night) — climate change came up anyway.
And it wasn’t climate change discussions happening in general on Twitter, but tweets that were specifically captured within the scope of our SOTU keywords and hashtag parameters.
Overall, we monitored Twitter traffic for just less than 24hrs, and during that time we collected 5,326,139 tweets from Twitter’s public streaming API, although at some point we did get rate-limited; meaning the volume of information we would be taking in exceeding the limits allotted to us, so the rate at which we were taking in data was restricted.
Before we talk about climate change specifically, though, here are some fun highlights from the night, the top 10 most retweeted users (ranked from highest to lowest) and the top 10 most used hashtags (ranked from highest to lowest), although we have the top 100 ranked in both.
It’s important to note that these numbers do not represent the final total of retweets as it stands now or total volume of those hashtags used, just the numbers captured in the approximate 24hr period from 2/5/19 at 11:57am until 2/6/19 at 11:10 am. And again, this data is only represents what was captured by monitoring the above-mentioned keywords and hashtags. Meaning the rankings of retweeted users shown above are only demonstrative of the tweets that included a keyword or hashtag from our list, and the list of hashtags ranks in order only show those which we were monitoring. It doesn’t represent the ranking of all hashtags used across Twitter during that period.
If you’re interested in seeing what the Twitter traffic of our hashtags and keywords looked like (volume per hour), we pulled a graph for you to take a look. We highlighted the count of tweets per hour (about 400,046) at the hour that the State of the Union began; a rate which, as you can see, increased as the speech went on.
And here’s something else that was fun to look at: a word cloud with handles, hashtags (like #SOTU) and common 3-letter words removed.
This word cloud, a discovery tool in our dashboard used to derive quick insights, seemed to confirm that the parts of Twitter which were participating in the SOTU discussions were also, in part, debating or referencing immigration issues and border security. Even though tweets which outright referenced the word “immigration” as either a keyword or hashtag represented less than 1% of all tweets collected.
And although we don’t have data to compare the relative popularity of this subject on Twitter (since we only monitored traffic for less than 24 hrs and we don’t have the data to compare it to other times and days — such as when the caravan or child separation news stories broke), collecting 198,587 tweets certainly gave our volunteers enough opportunity to reach out to leads and engage users about the immigration debate and invite them to be supporters of our work on GoFundMe.
The outreach strategy didn’t go as well as we’d hope and prepared for (granted we only thought of the idea about a week before the State of the Union).
However, we saw some interesting data, and as mentioned — we were delightfully surprised that even though our previous climate change data collection process had ended, the conversation on Twitter about it certainly hadn’t.
When we checked our repository of 5,326,139 tweets, we found that 25,059 tweets were collected which included the keywords “climate change.” Given that the climate change debate was the other topic we had covered both in our (Alternative) State of the Union and included in our fundraising campaign, we were giddy to look into what we had unintentionally captured.
> Tweets!
A quick look at this data revealed that while there were hundreds of people tweeting about climate change, the majority of the tweets mentioning it were (unsurprisingly) retweets. Here are the top ten:
The most retweeted tweet at the time was a tweet from freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, @IIhanMN, with what was the time 4,059 retweets of her climate change tweet. As of the time we took this screenshot (within the 60 second duration of 3:40 pm EST, 02/08/2019) that has since jumped to 7,463 retweets.
And from what we’ve seen, the comment section of this particular tweet sums up the opposing perspectives on this issue relatively well:
But this response was among those that actually did address the issue, while other comments on the thread brought up other persisting issues like gun control and relief for Puerto Rico.
The second most retweeted tweet was from Senator Sanders, with his tweet: “How can a president of the United States give a State of the Union speech and not mention climate change? #SOTU”
Which, during the 60 second duration of 3:50pm EST, was screenshot as being at 4,652 retweets. It’s worth mentioning that Bernie Sanders has since released a few videos and more tweets regarding climate change, but he was the second most retweeted on the list for this tweet exclusively.
The next most retweeted tweet was tweeted by Naomi Klein, when her tweet was retweeted only 2,785 times, which has since shot up to over 10k. And then Dinesh D’Souza’s tweet, which was only retweeted 1,421 times during our monitoring period, but has also expectantly increased.
From Dinesh D’Souza’s tweet, we took a screenshot of a part of the comment section. We thought this thread below exemplifies some of the sentiments we’ve collected on climate change in the past and was worth sharing:
From the denial of climate change occurring, claims of corruption and politically motivated geo-engineering, or stating that it’s only possible to prepare and not prevent climate change, we’ve seen these responses come up again and again in our data collection.
Note: we have not researched the accounts on the comment thread to assess whether they are likely bots. For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter.
Moving on, the New Green Deal supporter Senator Markey’s visionary tweet was retweeted 966 times during our collection period and writer Jane Mayers’ tweet below, which was seemingly both congratulatory and derogatory, was retweeted 742 times.
The National Resources Defense Council’s (the NRDC) tweet below was retweeted 685 times for the duration we monitored, while Joyce Alene was retweeted 661 times during that time, her tweet being a retweet of Jane Mayer’s tweet with a comment.
Overnight we saw that Adrienne Watson was retweeted 497 times, which has since significantly increased, and that Fox News host Laura Ingraham was retweeted 482 times; echoing the same reference we’ve seen in other top tweets which describe the State of the Union as a “disgrace,” but her take on it was that the reference was “COLD.”
But those were just the heavy-hitting tweets. Sentiments about climate change (particularly views of it being a hoax) had a lesser reach, but were still very much present:
Something to keep in mind about social media posts is that some are simply manufactured to sow dissent, or at least the appearance of it. Although it is not confirmed nor should it be assumed, it is possible that we picked up SOTU posts generated by the disinformation and fake news industry (potentially on both sides of the debate). Although its important to be aware of the possibility, it should not take away from the legitimate, persisting climate change debate in the United States (even thought the debate has been specifically targeted for disinformation campaigns to sow dissent within the public).
Chalking the political divide up to bots is an easy out, but our claim about a persisting debate is supported by survey data such as that from Pew Research which was referenced above. In that poll, 20% of their respondents (who are registered voters) were identified as believing there is “not enough evidence” to determine if climate change was happening. From that population, we guess that a small portion of that percentage are those who also believe that climate change is a hoax.
A view which others rush to explain:
Although we were excited to see climate change coming up, once we dug in, the content of the tweets weren’t surprising, and the takeaways from looking them over are something our team has known all along: the debate about climate change (and other topics that came up in our analysis such as gun control, natural disaster relief, abortion [sometimes referred to as infanticide], etc.) is an unsettled debate for many reasons. But one of these reasons is because we do not have a formal means of engaging in nation-wide deliberation about these issues, taking stock of what is known about the problems and proposed solutions, and guaranteeing that all views are sincerely heard in the process. The way we debate today is inherently limited, especially if we leave it up to a few politicians on stage or pundits on TV.
Social media is an incredible communication tool, but not a good deliberation tool, so we need something new for this purpose. If you’d like to see the work in action, please consider making a donation to us or supporting the Great American Debate project, by either by choosing the immigration debate or climate change debate to support the mission.
Thanks for reading.
Please let us know if you enjoyed this piece. We thought we’d share our preliminary findings, even though we only scratched the surface with our data collection.
You can find out more about us here: SocietyLibrary.org, InternetGovernment.org, GreatAmericanDebate.org
Thanks again to our friends at IST Research!
And if you haven’t already seen our (alternative) State of the Union buried in hyperlinks throughout the article — take a look! We had a week to create it alongside the campaign, but we’re happy to share it around.
