New York, People in the US are tweeting much more about embarrassment since US President Donald Trump took office, new research has found.
“Beyond embarrassment, there is a slight positive correlation between Trump and the words disgust, shame and anger,” said study co-author Dar Meshi, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the US.
“This means when people tweet these words, there’s a higher probability that they are tweeting about Trump,” Meshi said.
For the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Communication, the researchers analysed Twitter traffic sent from US accounts between June 2015 and June 2017.
“The Twitter data across America are really powerful. People are tweeting far more about embarrassment now than they were during the pre-Trump inauguration,” Meshi said.
“Overwhelmingly, the number one thing most consistently related to spikes of the word ’embarrassment’ on Twitter is Trump,” Meshi said.
The researchers identified instances when embarrassment mentions spiked and aggregated the tweet content during that time. Then, they created word clouds to see what words were most linked to embarrassment.
Three of the most-prominent peaks took place on October 10, 2016, March 18, 2017 and May 26, 2017, the findings showed.
These are the dates of the final 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, when Trump denied German Chancellor Andrea Merkel’s handshake at her visit to the White House and the date Trump pushed Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic at the NATO Summit, respectively.
The study showed there has been a 45 per cent increase in people tweeting about embarrassment since Trump took office.
