Social media was abuzz with reactions to Tuesday night’s political debate, and data suggests that Americans weren’t too impressed.
People fired off millions of election-related tweets and Facebook statuses during the heated faceoff between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
The overwhelming online sentiment was negative toward both candidates during the event marked by various insults and interruptions. Still, one candidate attracted more digitized ill-feelings than the other.
That’s according to data from the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which used a Salesforce software program to monitor online reactions to various topics surrounding the debate. Researchers identified keywords and gauged how people used them online 90-minutes before, during and an hour and a half after the debate.
Roughly 67% of the tweets mentioning both presidential candidates were negative in nature, the university found. However, only 60% of the tweets mentioning just Biden were negative compared to 67% of the tweets mentioning just Trump.
