1/n The Great Awokening: Twitter edition

Credits to the folks at https://storywrangling.org  for compiling and sharing these data.

2/n Next step: see how these trends relate to those observed in left-leaning news outlets (I'll have to check, but, on first glance, it looks like the media's awokening trends might actually precede those depicted here). More to come.

3/n Speaking of 'folks'

4/n Interesting that 'white supremacy' was on the rise even before Trump announced his candidacy (June 2015)

5/n Been running some granger tests on the yearly data. So far, most of the relationships I've observed appear to run from news media (e.g. NYT) -> twitter (i.e. the previous year's NYT term frequency predicts its twitter frequency in the following year, but not the inverse).

6/n Obviously, with just 11 data points, caution is warranted. I will try running the tests on the monthly NYT I grabbed from LexisNexis a while back and report back.

7/n So I pulled out the older (only runs through June 2019) monthly-level NYT data that I gathered from LexisNexis ( https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888?s=20). What I find is that the relationship between Twitter and NYT can be bidirectional for some terms, and unidirectional for others.

8/n Here is an example of a (strong) relationship that appears to run from NYT->Twitter

9/n By 'appears' I mean that NYT 'Racism' significantly predicts Twitter 'Racism', but not the inverse

10/n And here's an example of relationship that appears to run from Twitter->NYT

11/n I'm hoping to use ProQuest to build a newer monthly-level NYT database. But as far as I can observe in the present data, Twitter and the NYT (and/or other news outlets) essentially feed off each other.

12/n Another relationship that appears to run from Twitter->NYT

13/n Fucking knew it (I'm sure we all did)

14/n A lot of problematic hierarchies and systems of power starting coming into relief in 2014.