What is the tone of the 2016 presidential campaign on Facebook?

The words and language used every day reveal who we are and what we want. They translate our internal thoughts and emotions to others as means of communication. In our previous posts, we analyzed candidates’ Facebook data to understand topics being discussed and how candidates interacted with the public. Here’s a discussion of the evolution of the leading Republican and Democratic candidates’ campaign on their Facebook pages since they announced their candidacy.

We have deepened our analysis to include linguistic cues to understand the personal and psychological attributes of commenters. Reactions, linguistic, and psychological indices of candidates’ commenters reveal interesting findings. Democrats’ commenters scored the highest scores in analytical and anxiety indices. Republicans’ commenters scored the highest scores on clout, authenticity, anger, and sadness indices. The value in understanding these commenter attributes is to shed light on the type of supporters each candidate attracts, campaign strategies that affect supporters of opposition (i.e. email controversy and tax returns) and lastly, which events trigger the commenters’ tone. This gives us a clue of what to expect going into the final period of the 2016 elections.