President Trump delivered his third State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Feb. 5 to a Congress and country harshly divided by politics. Tensions were high on Twitter during the speech, as supporters of the president voiced their enthusiasm and opponents condemned his actions.
I began watching CNN's coverage of the State of the Union around 7:30 p.m. and flipped back and forth between their online coverage and CBS and Fox News, as I had another news assignment based on the speech and wanted to get all viewpoints. I followed #SOTU2020, #StateoftheUnion, and #BoycottSOTU on Twitter throughout the night.
As soon as I set up these hashtags in my TweetDeck, tweets were coming up at an overwhelming speed. I adjusted the settings to hide retweets, as the original tweet would have already shown up and I did not need to see it twice.
This had little to no effect on the number of tweets coming up in my feed, it was a constant stream of at least 200 tweets a minute for #SOTU2020 and #StateoftheUnion both before and during the address. #BoycottSOTU had a similar number of tweets before the speech began, but as the speech went on the number declined a little to about 140-150 tweets per minute.
While tweets were rolling out at a constant stream throughout the speech, there were a few moments that generated much more Twitter activity. Trump's entrance into the chamber produced a flurry of tweets, peaking when he apparently snubbed Speaker Nancy Pelosi's handshake offer. Throughout the speech, activity picked up when the president made grand gestures such as Rush Limbaugh's Presidential Medal of Freedom or the introduction of one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, but then died down back to around 200 tweets a little after the event.
The moment that sparked the most Twitter activity was at the very end of the speech when Pelosi ripped up her copy of the address. Her actions sent Twitter into a frenzy and produced the most tweets of the night.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi rips up her copy of the State of the Union address.
(Dan Semansky/AP)
The majority of the tweets from the speech came from individuals with their own opinions about the president and the speech. I was able to identify some tweets from news organizations or individual reporters, but they were quickly swept up in a whirlwind of even more tweets either condemning or praising the speech and the president.
Because they were coming in so fast, I was not able to identify multiple posts from the same sources, but I was able to determine that news organizations like CNN, ABC, and CBS and their political correspondents tweeted multiple times during the speech.
The general content of the tweets was extremely divisive and somewhat aggressive. Users were either strongly opposed to or supportive of the president. A large number of the tweets were quite hostile attacks on either President Trump or Nancy Pelosi.
The only tweets that were not partisan were the tweets that came from news organizations and reporters, but those tended to be drowned out by the large number of tweets from highly opinionated users.
Overall, the experience generally went as I expected it to. Given how partisan and controversial the president is, I was not surprised at the number of tweets critiquing or praising the GOP and the president. I think tensions were also running high due to the impeachment. I expected the "made for TV" moments that were included in the speech, but I did not really expect those same theatrics from Nancy Pelosi with her tearing up the speech.
Trying to follow and keep up with all of these tweets was definitely a challenging experience during an event like this. New trends and hashtags were constantly popping up based on what was happening, and monitoring them definitely seems like a job better suited for a team of people rather than just one person.
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