Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Daily Twitter follower growth rate for  @joebiden  and  @realDonaldTrump On January 6, 2021, the US Congress certified Joe Biden as the 46th US President .  On January 8, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account , fallout from his tweets regarding the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath of the events since Election Day up until the permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump , we compared the follower growth of the personal Twitter accounts of  the 45th US President Donald Trump ( @realDonaldTrump ) and the 46th US President Joe Biden ( @joebiden ) between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12.  We have also provided the historical Twitter follower count information for @joebiden and @realDonaldTrump  used for this analysis.  Although  @joebiden  gained approximately nine times the Twitter followers as  @realDonaldTrump  between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12,  ...

Figure 1: Line charts of absolute Twitter follower growth for the Twitter accounts, @berniesanders (top left),  @joebiden (top right), @marwilliamson (bottom left), and @petebuttigieg (bottom right). In our previous posts,   Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates  and    Revisiting Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates , we used  Twitter follower growth between 2019-01-01 and 2019-04-18 as a proxy to measure popularity of the Democratic candidates.  We found an 80% similarity between  the list of top 10 candidates based on absolute increase in the Twitter follower count and the final 10 candidates remaining in the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination race based on their campaign withdrawal date.  In order to collect historical Twitter follower count of the Democratic candidates, we parsed the follower count values from the Twitter mementos of the candidates. Miranda Smith , in her post,...

Figure 1: Screenshot of 24 of 27 Democratic candidates  hopeful of the Presidential nomination on May 25, 2019 (Source: The Washington Post) In our previous post,  Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates , we used the Twitter follower growth between 2019-01-01 and 2019-08-23 as a proxy to measure popularity of the Democratic candidates and categorized the campaign of each candidate based on their absolute Twitter follower growth into four categories: already popular, big winners, nobody noticed, and beneficial .  Since our previous post, all the candidates except Joe Biden, the presumptive presidential nominee, have dropped out. In this post, we revisit the Twitter follower growth of all 27 Democratic candidates by extending our study to between 2019-01-01 and 2020-04-18. We plotted an  interactive D3 Twitter follower graph to show the trends in the absolute increase of the followers for each candidate .    Twitter and Web Arc...