A Twitter analysis of the attack on the U.S. Capitol
Authors: Noah Britt & Janeth Sierra-Rivera
The United States Capitol has become a recognizable symbol of democracy, both nationally and internationally, because the building itself represents liberty and the ideals of freedom as expressed in the United States Constitution. As a result, the building has been viewed with near-sacrality and remained free from any major attack for over 200 years – when parts of the Capitol were burned by British troops in 1814 during the War of 1812.
However, that all changed on Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of U.S. President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol building as Congress met to certify the results of November’s presidential election which declared Joseph R. Biden the President-elect. Within minutes of the attack, images began to circulate across the web exhibiting the rioters as they stormed through the halls of the building, sat at the desks of Congress members, and yelled from the Senate chamber podium.
The charts below demonstrate the volume at which tweets increased as protestors stormed the Capitol.
More than 100,000 tweets took place between the hours of 4 -5 pm that day, however, they slowly declined throughout the evening.
President Donald Trump was at the center of the conversation, as a majority of the rioters set their sights on the Capitol after a rally held by President Trump earlier in the day.
The network graph below shows the widespread sentiment of the riots:
Chart Analysis:
- The color red represents an overall negative sentiment, while blue represents an overall positive sentiment, and gray represents an overall neutral sentiment.
- The position of each bubble within the graph is based on how related the users or the hashtags were to one another.
- The size of each user and hashtag was determined by the overall tweet popularity.
The analysis shows that President Trump was largely blamed for this attack and his actions resulted in Twitter placing a temporary, now permanent, suspension on his @realDonaldTrump account.
Although his name has been affiliated with the deadly insurrection, President Trump has remained insulated from most tweets regarding white privilege. This ultimately serves as an important observation because many of these conversations surrounding the topic of “white privilege” have drawn comparisons between the treatment of the Capitol Hill rioters and the Black Lives Matter activists during the racial justice protests that swept the nation over the last year.
According to Twitter, the riots seem to have actually had the opposite effect that its supporters desired.
As shown below, #stopthesteal tweets experienced a spike the day of the riot but overall tweet volume for the popular hashtag plummeted after the riot, indicating that many users were breaking with the movement that alleged fraud in the presidential election this past November.
Nonetheless, the most common hashtag for Trump supporters, #MAGA, has remained at pre-riot levels, indicating that, though many Twitter users still support President Trump, they no longer support the movement to overturn the results of the election.
Full Analysis:
Purpose:
To analyze the thoughts and sentiments of the Twitter conversations surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Analysis Time Frame:
January 6, 2021
Trends in Conversation:
- A majority of the hashtags examined in this analysis experienced a peak at approximately 4 pm.
- Various hashtags associated with President Trump are closely linked with the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trending Hashtags:
The conversations surrounding this unprecedented event were most notable on Twitter, where solely on Jan. 6 there were more than 732,000 tweets containing any of the following keywords:
- #capitolhill
- #dcprotest(s)
- #insurrection
- #maga
- #riot(s)
- #stopthesteal
- #stormthecapitol
- #trump
Sentiment:
Overall, 78 % of tweets surrounding the incident were tagged for having a negative sentiment.
