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Does Donald Trump Send His Own Tweets? An Investigation

by Boyce74F42 Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump tweets a lot. He’s pretty good at it too! Personally, I love his Twitter account. It’s a mix of insanity and self-promotion and insanity and, well, self-promotion. But it’s endearing!

I’ve always assumed that Trump sends his own tweets. This is not because Twitter is a holy place and everyone sends their own tweets, but his account tweets so many weird things that I figured he couldn’t have a professional ghost tweeter at the helm. That person would never let him send half the things he sends. But then a few weeks ago my colleague Ian Gordon pointed me to a Washington Post profile of his media handler, Hope Hicks, which had me in tears:

On his plane, Trump flips through cable channels, reads news articles in hard copy, and makes offhanded comments. He’s throwing out his signature bombastic, sometimes offensive tweets. Hicks takes dictation and sends the words to aides somewhere in the Trump empire, who send them out to the world.

Dictating is still tweeting in a sense, but it really isn’t the same. This means he’s not scrolling through his timeline, checking his mentions, having the full Twitter experience. He’s broadcasting.

Last night, however, the Wall Street Journal said that Trump is, in fact, tweeting:

Mr. Trump doesn’t use a computer. He relies on his smartphone to tweet jabs and self-promotion, often late into the night, from a chaise lounge in his bedroom suite in front of a flat-screen TV.

Now it’s possible that it’s a combination of both: Sometimes he dictates, and sometimes he tweets.

While this is an answer, it begs a new question: How much of his tweets are his? To figure this one out, we put on our social-media detective hats and took a trip to Twitonomy.com.

Since April 23, @realDonaldTrump has tweeted 3,197 times. (Twitter’s API limits how many tweets analytics tools can access, so we can’t go further back than that.)

Twitonomy

Twitonomy

A majority of those tweets (1,707) have come from Twitter for Android. Another 1,245 have come from Twitter.com. Ninety-nine have come from a BlackBerry, and another 99 have come from an iPhone.

Twitonomy

From the above WSJ article, we know Trump doesn’t use a computer, so Twitter.com is out. Those are being done by someone else. The question is: What smartphone is Trump using? Once upon a time, Trump made his dissatisfaction with the iPhone very clear when he demanded that Apple manufacture a larger screen. This is something Apple ended up doing with the iPhone 6 and the still larger iPhone 6+. It’s unclear if this enticed Trump back into the fold. There are some massive smartphones out there! Maybe he has a Galaxy Note 5.

An email to the Trump campaign was not immediately returned. But a second Washington Post article tells us that Trump does in fact tweet from an iPhone.

So, if that is accurate, only 3 percent of Donald Trump’s last 3,197 tweets—at most—actually came from his fingers. (Possibly less if one of his aides also uses an iPhone.) The rest were apparently dictated or, in the case of the Nazi image, sent out by an intern. He’s obviously a busy person (and old, at that), so I understand why he doesn’t send all his own tweets. But still, it takes some of the magic away.

Below are some more charts from Twitonomy about Trump’s tweets:

Twitonomy

Twitonomy

Twitonomy

Twitonomy

Twitonomy

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Does Donald Trump Send His Own Tweets? An Investigation

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Maps: The Mysterious Link Between Antibiotics and Obesity

by h0di80ju Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Lately, I’ve been fascinated by a study on antibiotic prescription rates across the United States that was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found a surprisingly wide variation among the states, and the rates—expressed in terms of prescriptions per 1,000 people—seemed to follow a geographical pattern: The Southeast had the highest rates, while the West’s were lower. West Virginia had the most prescriptions, and Alaska had the fewest. The rest of the country fell somewhere in between. Here’s a map of the findings:

As I thought more about the map, I wondered whether the prescription rates followed any demographic patterns. Lauri Hicks, a lead author of the study and a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me that her team had initially expected to find certain correlations—for example, higher prescription rates in states with large elderly populations. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. Take Florida, which has a sizeable elderly population, but only an average antibiotic prescription rate.

Yet Hicks’ team did find one very strong correlation: The states with higher rates of antibiotic use also tended to have higher obesity rates. Take a look at this map of obesity rates by state and see how it reflects the antibiotics map above:

When we mashed up the data behind these maps, we confirmed the strong correlation between obesity and antibiotic prescription rates (we got an r of 0.74, for the statistically inclined). We also found a correlation between the states’ median household incomes and antibiotic prescription rates: States with below-average median incomes tend to have higher antibiotic prescription rates. This makes sense, considering that high obesity rates correlate with low income levels. (You can see the data sets for antibiotic prescription rate, obesity, and median household income level here.)

Hicks and her team can’t yet explain the connection between obesity and high rates of antibiotic prescription. “There might be reasons that more obese people need antibiotics,” she says. “But it also could be that antibiotic use is leading to obesity.”

Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that antibiotics might be linked to weight gain. A 2012 New York University study found that antibiotic use in the first six months of life was linked with obesity later on. Another 2012 NYU study found that mice given antibiotics gained more weight than their drug-free counterparts. As my colleague Tom Philpott has noted repeatedly, livestock operations routinely dose animals with low levels of antibiotics to promote growth.

No one knows exactly how antibiotics help animals (and possibly humans) pack on the pounds, but there are some theories. One is that antibiotics change the composition of the microbiome, the community of microorganisms in your body that scientists are just beginning to understand. (For a more in-depth look at the connection between bacteria and weight loss, read Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s piece on the topic.)

Hicks says that more research is needed on the potential connection between antibiotics and obesity. But there are other reasons for doctors to change the way they prescribe antibiotics. As I noted a few weeks back, a recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that doctors commonly prescribe antibiotics for symptoms such as sore throat and bronchitis—which don’t usually require the drugs. Considering that bacteria are already evolving to withstand many antibiotics, it’s probably time to figure out how to use them more prudently.

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Maps: The Mysterious Link Between Antibiotics and Obesity

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