Social media — especially the immediate, back-and-forth conversations of Twitter — can reflect the issues most on peoples' minds. For New York City, that included reality TV, the Golden Globes, and the president.
Hoodline sifted through a week’s worth of the city’s loud and chaotic stream of tweets and figured out what really has you talking (or rather, typing).
But first, the numbers. Twitter users whose profiles place them in one of the five boroughs generated 3,672,316 tweets and retweets between Jan. 7 and Jan. 13. Daily tweets ranged from a high of 565,387 on Jan. 7 down to 449,566 on Jan.13.
Part of the chatter was locals taking part in national trending conversations, based on Twitter’s list of trending terms and tags for the week. Two of those in particular drew the attention of New York City’s tweeters: #TrumpAddress and #GoldenGlobes.
MSNBC correspondent @JoyAnnReid was one of those New Yorkers live-tweeting President Trump's nationally televised speech about the border, noting:
Trump is claiming that "the wall" -- now a "steel barrier" -- isn't his idea. It's now supposedly the request of U.S. border officials. #TrumpAddress
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 9, 2019
The Golden Globes honored actor and comedian Carol Burnett with a special achievement award, prompting comedian Judy Gold, @JewdyGold, to tweet:
Carol Burnett = genius + talent + class + hilarious + legend. Thank you for making me laugh during the good times and the very sad times of my childhood. Laughter brings people together. #GoldenGlobes2019
— Judy Gold 🇺🇸 (@JewdyGold) January 7, 2019
The city also saw dozens of hashtags arise locally during the week. Most of them didn’t gain much traction (that’s typical), but three that did were #Brooklyn (1,412 local tweets), #Jets (1,246 local tweets) and #Fashion (964 local tweets).
A coaching change for the New York Jets led the hashtag to peak even though the team hasn't played a game since the NFL season ended in December. On the announcement, WNBC anchor Bruce Beck, @BruceBeck4NY, tweeted:
The Jets have a new head coach - Adam Gase! Are you excited #jets fans?
— Bruce Beck (@BruceBeck4NY) January 10, 2019
Most of the city’s Twitter conversations happen without hashtags, so Hoodline also applied our analytical tools to the text of all 3.7 million tweets to surface more of what was on your mind.
The word cloud shows the relative frequency of the top 50 terms from tweets originating in New York City during the week. No. 1 was “people,” appearing 96,788 times. Other top words included “Trump” at 71,523, “wall” at 37,602 and “border” at 23,389.
To take the temperature on social media each week, we collect all tweets from NYC-based Twitter users and those tweets tagged with locations in the city, then apply our own complex analytical tools to refine the flood of tweets into a coherent analysis of the city’s week on social media.
There’s a lot of data behind our story, but it doesn’t include absolutely everything. We have, for example, cooked up ways to screen out offensive tweets, and we’ve taken steps to reduce the noise from bots and fake accounts.
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