For this Twitter API exercise I wanted to use a fun trending hashtag that popped up during the latest riff between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. When Bernie Sanders proposed a democratic debate with Hillary Clinton in New York, Clinton’s chief strategist Joel Benenson said on CNN that Clinton would not participate in another debate until Sanders changes his “tone.” Outrage ensued, particularly on Twitter, sparking the trending hashtag #ToneDownForWhat.
To get an overall look at what these tweets were about, I pulled scraped the Twitter API for 1,000 of the most recent tweets using the hashtag at the time of scraping on Wednesday, March 31. After looking at the data, I thought it would be interesting to visualize the top mentions and the top tweeters in graphs. Using the charts tool in Google spreadsheets I generated interactive bar graphs that display the most relevant data from the scrape. I included text explanation and the video of Joel Benenson’s blunder to help tell the story as well. At the end of the site I made sure to include a link to download the data I used. You can see the project here.
