As the Twitter Account of Donald Trump has been deactivated in the meantime, this analysis is not reproducible, but when Joe Biden became the president-elect of the United States, it was interesting to see, how the Twitter activity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump compared. Would we be able to see indications that Biden would live up to his “pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify” ?
To answer this question, this analysis (PDF) combined a natural language processing-enabled sentiment analysis with a more in-depth topical analysis of both the Twitter activity of Trump and Biden. The data for this was downloaded from the Twitter API on 03/12/2020 and covers tweets made by Biden and Trump between the 23/11 and 02/12 (GMT-5), excluding retweets. The number of tweets is for Biden n=44 and for Trump n=93.
While this brief analysis was based on only a short glimpse of the Twitter activity of the outgoing US president and the then president-elect, some interesting findings could be made. Among these are that more extreme sentiments do not necessarily spread more widely on Twitter. Instead, this seems to depend on the audience. The fact that Biden conveys more neutral sentiments in his tweets than Trump may mean that his messages are also less polarizing. The finding that his followers accredit neutral messages with higher retweet- and favourite-counts gives hope that these messages are also well-received.