We characterize the Twitter networks of both major presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with various American hate groups defined by the US Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). We further examined the Twitter networks for Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan, for 9 weeks around the 2016 election (4 weeks prior to the election and 4 weeks post-election). By carefully accounting for the observed heterogeneity in the Twitter activity levels across individuals under the null hypothesis of apathetic retweeting that is formalized as a random network model based on the directed, multi-edged, self-looped, configuration model, our data revealed via a generalized Fisher’s exact test that there were significantly many Twitter accounts linked to SPLC-defined hate groups belonging to seven ideologies (Anti-Government, AntiImmigrant, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, Alt-Right, Neo-Nazi, and White-Nationalist) and also to @realDonaldTrump relative to the accounts of the other four politicians. The exact hypothesis test uses Apache Spark’s distributed sort and join algorithms to produce exact samples in a fully scalable way from the null model. Additionally, by exploring the empirical Twitter network we found that significantly more individuals had the fewest retweet degrees of separation simultaneously from Trump and each one of these seven hateful ideologies relative to the other four politicians. We conduct this exploration via a geometric model of the observed retweet network, distributed vertex programs in Spark’s GraphX library and a visual summary through neighbor joined population retweet ideological trees. Remarkably, less than 5% of individuals had three or fewer retweet degrees of separation simultaneously from Trump and one of several hateful ideologies relative to the other four politicians. Taken together, these findings suggest that Trump may have indeed possessed unique appeal to individuals drawn to hateful ideologies, however such individuals constituted a small fraction of the sampled population.

1. Raazesh Sainudiin, Uppsala University / Combient AB
Rejecting the Null Hypothesis of
Apathetic Retweeting of US Politicians
and SPLC-defined Hate Groups in the
2016 US Presidential Election
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Definition (Hate Group):
The SPLC does not
necessarily consider all
groups or individuals on its
“Extremist Files” as violent or
engaged in criminal activities,
but rather identifies any
group or individual “whose
beliefs or practices attack
or malign an entire class of
people, typically for their
immutable characteristics”.
The database does not include foreign hate
groups or extremist groups such as ISIS, Al
Qaeda, or Boko Haram, as its focus is on
American hate groups.
Southern Poverty Law Center (2016) Hate map. SPLC.
October 11, 2013 4:00 AM, Available from
https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map. Accessed on May 28,
2017.

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● SparkSQL: Twitter Experimental Designs via
parquet single-column JSON string of each
status update as one row
○ future-proofing evolving schema
○ input to generic SparkML pipelines
● GraphX: Pregel-programmed Network Design
● SparkML/lib: various standard algorithms
● Spark Core: distributed sort and join
ELT Designs by Tweet Anatomy & Transmission Tree
See Project MEP: Meme Evolution Programme at
http://lamastex.org/lmse/mep/ and the databricks notebook
http://lamastex.org/lmse/mep/src/TweetAnatomyAndTrans
missionTree.html

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This is reality folks

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L1
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L2
= Landmark 2
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L2
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SWDPL = shortest
weighted directed
path length
via GraphX Pregel
SWDPL( , L1
) = 3
SWDPL( , L2
) = 1

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SWDPL( , L1
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SWDPL( , L2
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distance( , )
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From distance between
every pair of users
(based on a given set of
Landmark accounts) we
can obtain a retweet
ideological tree of the
population via
Neighbor-Joining
algorithm.

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● Customizable dynamically
adaptable set of set of
“landmark” accounts to define
the desired notion of diversity
in the population ideological
forests
● “Where Am I?” Operator for a
kind of “ideological weather
report” that can be done by
any Citizen “towards
participatory democracy in the
big data age!”
● Live Research on:
Meme Evolution Programme
○ https://bit.ly/2OTiUH9

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