Social media — especially the immediate, back-and-forth conversations of Twitter — can reflect the issues that are most on peoples' minds.
For San Franciscans, those issues have included the Golden Globes, the president, and one of the year’s largest tech expos.
Hoodline sifted through a week’s worth of the city’s loud and chaotic stream of tweets to figure out what really has locals talking (or rather, typing).
But first, the numbers. Twitter users whose profiles place them in San Francisco generated 1,120,573 tweets and retweets between Jan. 7 and Jan. 13. Daily tweets ranged from a high of 176,902 on Jan. 9, down to 130,298 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 San Francisco’s tweeters: #GoldenGlobes and #TrumpAddress.
The news site TechCrunch tweeted:
Congrats to Roma on winning Best Director at the #GoldenGlobes! Our staff agreed it's one of the year's best films https://t.co/rOWCGxU9ON
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) January 7, 2019
In response to President Trump’s national television address on the border, technologist and blogger Tom Coates tweeted:
I would say watching NBC news right now, they’re basically flat out talking about it as a manufactured crisis and full of misstatements and misleading statements or lies. Which it is. I imagine most of the mainstream media will be describing it in the same way. #TrumpAddress
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) January 9, 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 #ces2019 (the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which racked up 3,035 local tweets), #jpm19 (the San Francisco-based J.P. Morgan Healthcare Investor Conference, which netted 687 local tweets) and a perennial local topic of discussion, the #sfgiants (477 local tweets).
Dieter Bohn, executive editor of The Verge, tweeted this roundup of products that charmed his publication at the annual tech expo:
Here are the best, strangest, and most exciting things we saw at #CES2019https://t.co/SCLnQ88g6F
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) January 11, 2019
Covering the J.P. Morgan healthcare investor conference, CNBC health reporter Christina Farr tweeted:
One thing I kept hearing over and over at #JPM19 is the term "incentive alignment."
— Christina Farr (@chrissyfarr) January 11, 2019
It might sound boring, but this is in fact massively important as many people in health care want to do the right thing. They are hampered in a system that trades on volume, not value.
In Giants news, the ballpark got its fourth name since its 2000 opening, with the team's official Twitter account tweeting:
New name, same incredible ballpark. Welcome to Oracle Park!#SFGiants pic.twitter.com/fpaDc7kzLp
— San Francisco Giants (@SFGiants) 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 1.1 million tweets to surface more of what was on our collective minds. National politics were a big concern, especially the president and the ongoing government shutdown.
The word cloud shows the relative frequency of the top 50 terms from tweets originating in San Francisco during the week. No. 1 was “Trump,” appearing 29,026 times. Other top words included “love” at 20,867, “wall” at 13,712 and “shutdown” at 8,160.
To take the temperature on social media each week, we collect all tweets from SF-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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