Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Alternative Facts Don't Generate More Re-Tweets

Recently it was mentioned that in the first 60 days or so of President Trump's administration, he had used Twitter 298 times. Those "tweets" with questionable facts were "re-tweeted" 28,550 times on average while others were passed along 23,945 times on average. That 4,605 difference sounds big; it's about 16% more "re-tweets" for the ones with "alternative facts".

IF we ASSUME that the data for the two groups of "tweets" has similar variability, we can look at the proportion of "re-tweets" for group 1 with group 2 and see if there's a significant difference. The proportion is 54.4% (28K/52K). Not so big a difference when the margin of error is +/- 5.6%. In other words, there's no statistical significant difference between the two groups. We have to say that more likely it's true that all of President Trump's "tweets" are "re-tweeted" at the same rate.

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