2019/09/30 by Peter Sheridan Dodds, Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Joshua R. Minot +15
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Art #Asian Culture and Media Studies #Business #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Diverse Topics in Contemporary Research #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Function (biology) #Law #Literature #Media studies #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Political science #Politics #Presidential election #Presidential system #Realm #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #Sociology #Style (visual arts) #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.00149
31 pages (21 pages main text, 10 pages appendix), 8 figures (7 in main text, 1 in appendix), 10 tables (1 in main text, 9 in appendix)
openalex publication_date 2019/09/30 · arxiv created 2021/10/29 · arxiv updated 2021/11/02 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
When building a global brand of any kind -- a political actor, clothing\nstyle, or belief system -- developing widespread awareness is a primary goal.\nShort of knowing any of the stories or products of a brand, being talked about\nin whatever fashion -- raw fame -- is, as Oscar Wilde would have it, better\nthan not being talked about at all. Here, we measure, examine, and contrast the\nday-to-day raw fame dynamics on Twitter for US Presidents and major US\nPresidential candidates from 2008 to 2020: Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt\nRomney, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. We assign ``lexical\nfame'' to be the number and (Zipfian) rank of the (lowercased) mentions made\nfor each individual across all languages. We show that all five political\nfigures have at some point reached extraordinary volume levels of what we\ndefine to be ``lexical ultrafame'': An overall rank of approximately 300 or\nless which is largely the realm of function words and demarcated by the highly\nstable rank of `god'. By this measure, `trump' has become enduringly\nultrafamous, from the 2016 election on. We use typical ranks for country names\nand function words as standards to improve perception of scale. We quantify\nrelative fame rates and find that in the eight weeks leading up the 2008 and\n2012 elections, `obama' held a 1000:757 volume ratio over `mccain' and 1000:892\nover `romney', well short of the 1000:544 and 1000:504 volumes favoring `trump'\nover `hillary' and `biden' in the 8 weeks leading up to the 2016 and 2020\nelections. Finally, we track how only one other entity has more sustained\nultrafame than `trump' on Twitter: The K-pop (Korean pop) band BTS. We chart\nthe dramatic rise of BTS, finding their Twitter handle `@bts\_twt' has been\nable to compete with `a' and `the'. Our findings for BTS more generally point\nto K-pop's growing economic, social, and political power.\n