I am collecting data about the #MakeAmericaGreatAgain hashtag to see how @America is trending in light of recent events.
I am curious to see how many people are using the #MakeAmericaGreatAgain in regards to positive Trump Tweets, Negative tweets, and completely unrelated tweets. I feel that since Trump’s rise to fame, this hashtag and phrase has become very popular, and it’s reach has extended past politics.
First look: I see a lot of retweets of an account called @The_Trump_Train in regards to the electability of a Supreme Court Justice. The majority of these tweets seem to be positive in regards towards Trump, but some are using the hashtag with completely oppositional views (for example, posts about supporting black history month). I expected more unrelated posts with this hashtag or parody tweets. This is the most tweeted post under this hashtag right now: RT @The_Trump_Train: “RETWEET if you think Judge Neil Gorsuch will be a great Supreme Court Justice! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.” I went on @The_Trump_Train account and saw that he/she has 120k followers and the tweet in question has 5k retweets. I retweeted this tweet from my own account but did not find it on my spreadsheet.
There are very few hits for #makeamericagreatagain and only one is in english. One article is a letter to the editor and the other is a comparison of America and Germany, in spanish! However, searching ‘make america great again’ yields many many pages of results. The people around me are also having trouble getting findings when they search with the hashtag included, but without the hashtag everyone is getting a lot of results. I think that hashtags are not officially news yet, so they are not in the search criterion for articles, but in the near future they will be. The news right now is all about the ‘muslim ban’ and immigration policies put in place by Trump. Some articles are in favor and others are against. There seems to be nobody in the middle. This may be a result of Trump polarizing America.
In 2006 there were no results for ‘Make America Great Again’. The search does yield results, but its all for ads on the side and related articles from 2016. It seems that Trump really did invent this slogan recently, and did not just recycle it from the past. It is unsurprising that a slogan from the 2016 election was not prevalent in 2006. This is evidence that trending topics burst onto the scene and can catch fire really quickly. News appears faster than ever before now. We live in a new information age that travels at the speed of the internet. I assume a lot of my peers are having trouble getting results from 2006 as well.
I really enjoyed doing this lab because it was cool to see real time tweets being gathered. It also was a little scary how much information one could obtain from just putting a hashtag through a program. The data scraping not only told me how many people were tweeting about my hashtag, it also told me personal information about the people who were tweeting. It is crazy to think how much data is being gathered at every moment. I believe I am collecting both live data and connecting to the liveliness of the issue because on one hand I am getting updates on what people are thinking at the current moment about Trump’s presidency, while at the same time some tweets are addressing current events and expressing views on those live events. Some tweets fit the article’s description of liveliness because they address the relevance of current issues and also other tweets address the article’s definition of ‘live data’, which are current terms.
citations:
Brown, Gloria. 2017. “Questions for those who oppose Trump”, Coastal Courier. January 30. http://coastalcourier.com/section/4/article/85165/
Brown, Mark. 2017. “Brown: Trump won’t make America great again without refugees” Chicago Sun Times, January 31. http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/brown-trump-wont-make-america-great-again-without-refugees/
Lucario, Sandra. 2017 “#MakeGermanyGreatAgain … O no” The Huffington Post Mexico, January 30. http://www.huffingtonpost.com.mx/2017/01/30/makegermanygreatagain-o-no/
Marres, Noortje, and Esther Weltevrede. 2013. “Scraping the Social?” Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (3): 313–35.
Willingham, AJ. 2017. “Make America Great Again has surprise backer” CNN, January 26. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/26/politics/muslim-billboard-florida-trnd/
I am surprised that a significant number of tweets mentioned the Supreme Court justice nomination since I always perceived that #MakeAmericanGreatAgain referred to the desire to strengthen (or even revive) the U.S.’s economy and its position as a global superpower which Supreme Court justices do not play a significant role in. The lack of media attention on the hashtag is quite puzzling because, in my opinion, the term is the greatest symbol of President Trump’s ideology and defines his motives for the controversial policies that he has already implemented in his first month in office. I expected the media to use the hashtag more, but they could have avoided it to allude to their discontent and lack of support for Trump and his policies. The lack of news articles using the hashtag could indicate bias from the media.
Did you try to search for 2006 news articles on the decline of the U.S. and the rise of other superpowers? Anxiety on the U.S.’s economy relative to other countries could give insight on how #MakeAmericaGreatAgain could have evolved. Or since surprisingly a large number of tweets were about the Supreme Court justice nomination, a search for news articles on the implications of picking a new Supreme Court justice? Some Americans could have felt discontent on the Supreme Court rulings in the last ten years and hope that Trump’s nomination can lead to more conservative rulings in the future.
Your findings reminded me how polarized our hashtags are from one another (mine is #nobannowall) as no one who used that tweet ever quoted #MakeAmericanGreatAgain. Even on the internet which is thought to help bridge different worlds and allow people to access all information, people can still choose to alienate themselves.
Thank you Jennifer. rock on
If there was a like button, I’d like this.
Excellent article about the #makeamericagreatagain hashtag. I did find it surprising that there were negative connotations with some of the tweets since the slogan is generally used in a positive way when referring to president Trump. I am not surprised there were no topics in 2006 about this hashtag since it is a very contemporary topic. I wonder what the search results would be like when Trump announced his campaign for presidency. There could be some cool and interesting topics revolving around this hashtag throughout his campaign, and certainly there will be some interesting ones for the next four years.