My hypothesis is: when Kanye expresses his politics (e.g. support for Trump, controversial views on race), his tweets perform worse. (Worse = more likes.) The independent variables are: words that he mentions (e.g. Trump, MAGA); general theme of the tweet (e.g. race). The data includes: the tweet; # of replies; # of retweets; # of likes; Trump mentioned/not; race mentioned/not. To create my dataset, I crawled through Kanye’s most recent tweets (to Dec. 31 2018) and collected 24 samples, making note of independent and dependent variables. My findings were that Kanye’s tweets performed roughly on average similarly regardless of whether he mentioned politics or not. To reflect, I think that I’d need a much larger sample size to accurately assess how much this content specifically impacts Tweet performance. Some nonsensical Tweets perform absurdly well, and some Trump tweets, for example, also do well. But that’s the same for Tweets that perform poorly. Some factors, like Tweet posting time may be something I didn’t account for, or whether Tweets with worse performance were posted close to when Tweets with high performance were (i.e. people might only like one Kanye tweet per day, and thus like the first one they see). My general conclusion is that the popularity of Kanye’s tweets is dictated likely by factors other than political content.
