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"#POTUS" -- A Snapshot into How Twitter Users Feel about the President

Sentiment expressed on social media is far from a scientific poll of the overall population's feelings toward President Trump, but it can offer a valuable measure of expressed attitudes within the online public square.

Below are two figures that offer telling insights into current discussion of "#POTUS" among Twitter users as of February 25, 2017 (the day of this writing). Using the NRC Emotion Lexicon in R, I analyzed a dataset of 2,896 Tweets tweeted by 2,455 unique Twitter users that I scraped just this afternoon. [Note: I'm still collecting more Tweets as I write this post, and it'll take some time before I have a sizable dataset.]



The positive vs. negative sentiment score counts per Tweet clearly lean positive. Much of this positive sentiment, as the below figure shows, likely results from a substantial amount of trust that appears in several Tweets that contain #POTUS.



While fear, anger, sadness, and disgust all make showings, trust, joy, anticipation, and surprise appear, in combination, more frequently than do occurrences of more negative emotions. Whether this distribution is reflective of an enduring longitudinal trend is uncertain; however, as of this moment, people appear to be expressing more positive than negative feelings toward POTUS, at least on Twitter. Of course, the president's current approval rating is certainly not as strong as his apparent approval rating in the Twitterverse.

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