The Euclidean Metrics of Trump’s Twitter Account

Our online personality is now as measurable as our carbon footprint. In addition to some rather obvious statistics, such as how often we tweet, how many others we follow, and how many others follow us, we principally reveal ourselves in our choice of words. How often I refer to “I,” “me,” “myself,” “mine,” and “my” can tell you a good deal about my propensity for self-absorption, while a frequent use of “we” and “our” indicates a willingness to share either credit or blame. The frequency with which I use “you” or “your” is just as indicative of a desire to channel my feelings outward, so if I also show a partiality for negative words, this pairing of observables is strongly indicative of hostility. Frequent use of “LOL,” “OMG,” and the exclamation point reveals an excitable personality, while emoticons and hashtags such as #irony and #sarcasm make explicit not just my feelings but a playful stance toward the content of my own tweets. The use of complex sentence structures hinging on the logical connectives “if,” “but,” “yet,” and “therefore” suggests a capacity for analytical thinking, while frequent questions—especially those involving words of negative sentiment—offer a clue to a nervous disposition.

Using simple linguistic criteria such as these in combination with an array of sentiment lexicons, James Pennebaker and his team at the University of Texas have developed