The Presidential Race in Emojis
Tracking how Twitter users feel about the presidential candidates, from đ to đ© (and everything in between).
Figuring out how Americans feel about political candidates is a tricky business. But thanks to the invention of emojis, seeing how Twitter feels about everything else is easy. Momâs cooking? The latest Star Wars movie? It could be đ, đ±, or the ubiquitous đ.
So weâre combining the two. Below, youâll find a tool that grabs live tweets about candidates and extracts the emojis used to describe them, providing a rolling 24-hour view of Internet sentiment. You can click any emoji in this tool to see the latest tweet that uses it in connection with a particular candidate.
Necessary caveats: Twitter doesnât provide a feed of every public tweetâonly a random sampleâso this tool wonât include every single mention of a candidate. Also, weâve filtered out đ, the Oxford Dictionaries 2015 Word of the Year, which is so popular it threatened to drown out the interesting differences between the candidates.
If you canât see a certain emojiâweâre sorry! Some computers and browsers donât display emoji normally, so weâve used Twitterâs Twemoji tool to replace them with images. Twitter has yet to add some of the newest characters, so you could see some gaps. (Thanks to Atlantic developer Frankie Dintino for help filling those in!)