Last fall we looked at how often Donald Trump's tweets had been cited in the world's news media from 2016 to September 2019. How have those trends continued through Covid-19 and the George Floyd protests?

The timeline below shows the total number of worldwide online news articles monitored per day since April 2016 that embedded or linked to a Donald Trump tweet using a rolling 7 day average to smooth the data. In all, 1.04 million articles have been monitored by GDELT that embedded or linked to one of his tweets.

The timeline below shows the raw unsmoothed timeline for 2020, showing how from late April through late May, Trump's tweets largely fell out of interest in the media, hitting a low point on May 24. However, each day from that point his tweets rapidly gained media interest, peaking on May 29 and falling each day since.

 

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Computing the timeline above took just a single line of SQL in BigQuery!

SELECT SUBSTR(CAST(DATE AS STRING), 0, 8) Day, count(1) Count FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.gkg_partitioned` WHERE LOWER(Extras) like '%twitter.com/realdonaldtrump%' group by day order by day asc