I am collecting data on the hashtag #ObamaCare to determine whose going to pay for President Trump’s new policies, and to see how people all over the world react to Trump’s new policies.
#ObamaCare is a hashtag that I would like to follow and learn more about, as this is another new controversy as a result of the Trump election. President Trump wants to get rid of Obama Care, which takes away health care for many people. Many people are expressing their displeasure with Trump on Twitter, as he thinks ObamaCare has too many problems associated with it. I think that this is a hashtag that will give a lot of data to work with as many people depend on ObamaCare and will continue to fight for it. On the other hand, many people also support Trump’s decision to get rid of Obamacare so I hope to learn reasons as to why so many people are expressing their concern about Trump’s decision to get rid of Obamacare, as well as reasons as to why people are supporting him.I’m also very curious to see who ends up paying for all the things that Obamacare covered and curious to see if the government or people have different solutions/plans to make up for the loss of Obamacare. I find this to be a topic of interest because I want to end up somewhere in the health field in the future, and this is something that will most definitely affect professions in this field.
Before I looked at all the tweets regarding my hashtag, I expected to see a even split of tweets supporting Obama Care and tweets supporting President Trump’s decision to repeal Obama Care, and this is something that I found to be accurate after scrolling through hundreds of tweets. One thing that stood out to be that I wasn’t really expecting was the amount of tweets by government figures (President Trump, President Obama, Paul Ryan, and multiple senators) that were being retweeted religiously. One of these tweets was by Speaker Paul Ryan: “RT @SpeakerRyan: This week, the House made a lot of progress on our plans to repeal & replace #Obamacare. https://t.co/98rUR3buYn @jordan_rhew”, but there were also tweets from Obama Care supporters that were being retweeted: “RT @OFA: Public pressure is working. Don’t stop fighting—keep calling to protect #Obamacare: https://t.co/Dg2QTU2WCD #CareNotChaos https… @Bostonbriana”. I wasn’t expecting this hashtag to cause so much controversy on Twitter, but I was very wrong abut that. I noticed that many people who support Obama Care have been stating facts/statistics to show how Obama Care has benefited the lives of so many families around America. From my understanding, there is a huge sense of fear throughout this country as a result of many people thinking that they are not going to be able to afford proper health care for themselves and their families, and I can feel this sense of fear through many of the tweets that I read.
There were not many search results in the last week when I entered #Obamacare into google, but when I entered ‘Obamacare’ or ‘Obama care’, over 10 pages of results showed up. I talked to Tim Peng about how his search went when he searched for results for #makeamericagreatagain, and he had a similar issue where there were not many results, but when Tim searched ‘make america great again’, hundreds of articles came up. I believe that it is more beneficial, and easier to find articles on your topic, by searching it without the hashtag. I was able to find articles that both supported Trump, and ones that show how repealing Obamacare can financially hurt many families. The articles I read have been mentioning new regulations that Trump and his administration are imposing on Obamacare to fix some of the flaws Trump believed it had. I read an outstanding article on Boston.com about how a family would not be able to afford a $200,000 backpack that keeps their child (who suffers from idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension) alive without Obamacare, which is something that hit me hard. If Obamacare gets repealed, this child is going to have a tough time surviving as her family would not be able to afford the life saving backpack. This article really opened my eyes about what is happening with this huge controversy and how some people depend on Obamacare for their survival. I also read articles about how doctors talk about if Obamacare gets repealed, their needs to be an immediate replacement that meets the needs of all the people who depend heavily on Obamacare.
Due to the fact that Obamacare was signed into law in March of 2010, I was not able to find any articles on Obamacare that dated back to 2006. President Obama was not president in 2006, President Bush was, which explains why Obamacare was not yet a policy in 2006. I talked to a few other friends in the class who also had some difficulty finding articles that dated back to 2006, as some of our topics were not relevant then.
This article gave me a new perception on data scraping and how essential it is in understanding data about various issues. On top of that, this lab was unreal in the way that we were able to track tweets at the same time they were being tweeted and learn about different perspectives that people have about a single topic. After reading the article by Marres and Welteverde, I feel like I am collecting live data and, as well as connecting to the actual liveliness of an issue, in this case, Obamacare. I was able to see various interactions between people and this topic, and able to see the various ways people feel about Obamacare being repealed. I was able to see different points of views, from people of all ages, genders, and social status. It was truly amazing to see all the different emotions that came with different tweets, and that is where I felt the connection to the actual liveliness of the issue. This was a great lab and I look forward to learning more about Obamacare and what happens with it in the near future.
Citations:
Mangan, Dan. 2017. “Trump administration proposes new Obamacare regulation that could make ‘special enrollments’ tougher”. CNBC (cnbc.com). February 2. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/02/proposed-new-obamacare-regulation-could-restrict-special-enrollments.html
Fox, Maggie. 2017. “Doctors Make the Case for Obamacare or Something Like it”. NBC news (nbcnews.com). February 2. http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-make-case-obamacare-or-something-it-n716196
Siegel, Marc. 2017. “What Republicans Need to Remove, Keep and Add to Obamacare”. Observer (observer.com). February 3. http://observer.com/2017/02/obamacare-remove-keep-add/
Dwyer, Dialynn. 2017. “A $200,000 backpack keeps this toddler alive. Without Obamacare, her family couldn’t afford it”. Boston.com. February 2. https://www.boston.com/news/national-news/2017/02/02/this-3-year-old-receives-life-saving-medicine-from-a-backpack-without-obamacare-her-family-couldnt-afford-it
Marres, Noortje, and Esther Weltevrede. 2013. “Scraping the Social?” Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (3): 313–35
I think it is great that you aspire to be in the health field and therefore want to learn more about the Obama Care crisis that is of high relevance today and in the future. I agree that Twitter is special in a sense that it allows you to feel peoples fear and emotion through their words.Twitter is a form of media in which people do not hold back their opinion, so I agree that there will be a lot of information to be found concerning your hashtag for both sides of the argument. I was also very moved by the article you wrote about regarding the child’s lifesaving backpack and found it to be very correlative to the data you are collecting.
Going forward, it might be interesting to research what the percentage of people who tweet are in favor of Obamacare versus those who are against it, and count the numbers in a group of 100 tweets. Your post has encouraged me to look closely for more tweets by political/government figures, like you found with President Trump, Ex-President Obama, Paul Ryan, etc. to see what their views are on my topic of the women’s march.
I think this topic is very interesting because it is not something that I personally know much about but know that I probably should. My dad works in the healthcare field on the insurance end so I can’t wait to show this to him because I am sure he will think it is cool. It is intriguing that your data shows you the view of both supports and those who oppose Obamacare as the issue is a hot topic with Trump around. It’s also interesting how a lot of your tweets are coming from political figures. I personally have never thought to follow politicians on twitter but that seems like a better way to get their stance on an issue.
Moving forward, I think it would be interesting to see if you could somehow divide the tweets into groups of political figures vs non-political figures to see who that percentage varies. Through your post, I have been encouraged to look more into who the people are that are tweeting about my issue. I wonder if there are lot of politicians tweeting or not.