Skip to content
Naked Security Naked Security

How to tell the “real” @realDonaldTrump, and why it’s a security lesson for us all

The "real" @realDonaldTrump, as opposed to much calmer tweets from what's apparently his staff.
Written by
August 15, 2016
Naked Security @realDonaldTrump David Robinson Donald Trump sentiment analysis text analysis text mining

We can never say it often enough when it comes to staying safe on the internet: just because somebody claims to be a particular person doesn’t mean they’re not someone else entirely.

Like, say, the guy who pretended he was Justin Bieber, but who was actually a 35-year-old UK man who was subsequently imprisoned for talking children into stripping in front of a webcam.

Or, say, Craig Brittain, former owner of the revenge porn site IsAnybodyDown, who conned women out of nude images by posing as a woman on a Craigslist women’s forum – a practice known as catfishing.

And then again, there’s Donald Trump.

Even the most casual look at his Twitter feed shows that sometimes the presidential wannabe flings insults like monkeys hurling dung, in full-throttle vitriolic FULL CAPS!!!

…while sometimes he sounds like a bland, albeit upbeat, campaigner, doing the e-version of kissing babies: that is, thanking people for their support in a professional way, sans full caps, replete with hashtags and links.

More than a few people have noticed a pattern in this split-Twitter-personality.

One of those people is Todd Vaziri, a visual effects artist who recently wrote about a theory that he came to after 60 days of Donald Trump’s tweets. Vaziri’s theory goes as follows: the more stately, full-sentence tweets, which mostly seemed to come from an iPhone (third-party apps such as Tweetbot show this type of metadata), come from Trump’s staff, while the hyperbolic, fragmented, angry tweets are coming from the Trumpinator himself, via his Android.

If you’d like to see for yourself, Jake Marsh has published a spreadsheet that groups a collection of @realDonaldTrump tweets according to device used to publish them, along with the guess at who did the writing/publishing.

Some interesting observations have arisen since Vaziri posted his theory. Most notably, it seems that the tweets that thank people come from the iPhone, or from what people have been assuming are Trump staffers.

Gawker has gone so far as to use Tweetdeck to filter out the iPhone tweets presumably coming from Trump’s handlers and to deliver up “pure Donald” via its REAL real Donald Trump Twitter feed.

There have actually been some factoids to bolster the Android-is-Trump theory too. For one thing, the New York Times reported that he’s an Android guy – specifically, Samsung Galaxy is the tool of his 140-character opinions.

Now, there’s even more solid data to back up the hypothesis.

David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, last Tuesday published the results of text analysis that he says confirms that Trump writes only the (angrier) Android half that makes up his @realDonaldTrump feed.

Robinson’s been writing about text mining and sentiment analysis recently, and the Trump hypothesis was just begging to be investigated with real data crunching, he said.

What he found confirmed that Vaziri’s hypothesis is correct, he says. He arrived at this conclusion by analyzing:

  • The times of day the two platforms published: Android/Trump tweets are solidly clustered in the morning, while the campaign posts from the iPhone come during more typical work hours, in the afternoon and early evening.
  • The two mobile operating systems have distinctive ways of using hashtags, links, and retweets. Android/Trump tends to use what Robinson calls the “anachronistic” method of manually retweeting by copying and pasting tweets and surrounding them with quotation marks, like so:
  • iPhone/Trump staff were 38 times more likely to attach images to tweets. That’s in keeping with the theory that this is the account running the business end of the Trump campaign, given that the iPhone tends to come out with more “announcement” messages, like this one:

Robinson also analyzed the message content. In doing so, he found that the most frequently used words that were most likely to come from the Android included “badly,” “crazy,” “weak,” “dead,” and “dumb”. In other words, a lot of what he calls “emotionally charged” words.

Robinson:

This supports the original hypothesis that this is the “angrier” or more hyperbolic account.

As far as sentiment analysis goes, the Android/Trump feed uses about 40% to 80% more words related to disgust, sadness, fear, anger, and other “negative” sentiments than the iPhone account does, Robinson concluded.

We can look at it like this, from a security perspective: on the internet, it is indeed true that nobody knows you’re a dog.

Just because someone appears to be a particular person, doesn’t mean they really are. Be careful what you believe online, and keep an ear out for tell tale signs of growling.


Image of Donald Trump courtesy of a katz / Shutterstock.com

About the Author

Read Similar Articles

21 Comments

I thought it was common knowledge that some celebrities had people manage their Twitter accounts. The fact that the real Trump uses the account at all actually surprises me.
As for “do the same analysis for Hillary”, she’s probably very firmly in the camp of letting her PR people do all of that for her.

“Probably”? Well, why doesn’t Sophos dedicate the same amount of effort to finding out for sure? Maybe that’s an incorrect assumption. And journalists are concerned about facts – right?

On a more interesting note, if the tweets aren’t from Trump then can he be prosecuted under the CFAA?

And Sophos continues to let Lisa promote her political activism in the guise of journalism. Rather than being satisfied with simply reporting the results of “research” that is hostile towards someone she opposes, she has to include verbiage like “the presidential wannabe flings insults like monkeys hurling dung, in full-throttle vitriolic FULL CAPS!!!” after warning us about revenge porn operators. Another good example of classic advocacy writing form Lisa, where she openly advocates for or against people or causes based on her personal feelings. I suppose I should be used to it by now.

Have to agree. I don’t like Trump at all, I think he’s dangerous, divisive, and is intentionally playing on the anxieties and insecurities of Americans while making a complete mockery of democracy. That being said, the article reads like a local newspaper oped that was written by someone with an obvious bias and no attempt at being objective. The author accuses Trump of being hyperbolic (and I agree) but I feel “stories” like this belong on a personal blog as your choice of phrasing is hyperbolic too. Let the facts speak for themselves without adding in personal dramatic narrative or post this stuff on your Facebook page instead.

This is no newspapers but blog. People writing there are not official speakers of Sophos. However I agree with you that pushing political opinions into tech articles is not very proffesional.

According to the “About” link below, this is an official Sophos publication, which means that Sophos is taking a position in the upcoming US election.

I’ll admit this bothers me.

I’ve read the article a few times, and it seems that the “position” we are taking has nothing to do with the forthcoming election at all. Wouldn’t we have to, well, take a political position (such as to say whcich candidate we preferred, or or say why we thought you should vote for one rather than the other, or review each candidate’s policies) in order to be taking a political position?

The article does, however, cover what the headline suggests, as far as I can see. And Mr Trump DOES seem touse MAJUSCULE quite a lot, which is generally accepted as being somewhere between SHOUTING and RANTING when you do it online.

Paul, I strongly disagree with your contention that the article is not Lisa’s attempt to express a political opinion regarding one of the only two candidates in the election. Her use of loaded words and emotional phrases is a common tactic used to attack one candidate/issue without obviously supporting the other candidate/issue. I have been reading Naked Security for some time now, and Lisa has made her leftist preferences well-known to your readership through her frequent use of obvious advocacy writing techniques. I have come to expect it and am usually (pleasantly) surprised when I read an unbiased article under her byline.

I couldn’t care less what her personal opinions are and she has the right to express them on her own blog. But this is not Lisa’s blog – it is Sophos’ blog and by providing her a regular platform to continually express politicized viewpoints Sophos is at risk of alienating part of its customer base. The “…presidential wannabe flings insults like monkeys hurling dung, in full-throttle vitriolic FULL CAPS” is her description of a candidate supported by a large number of US voters. It doesn’t take much imagination to have a pretty fair idea of what Lisa thinks of those supporters. Many in the US are not as far to the left in the political spectrum as mainstream Europeans seem to be, so Lisa’s writing stands out like a sore thumb to some of us where it may not to you. At the very least it undermines the professionalism of the site.

And, please, don’t feign ignorance of the importance of word choice in presenting arguments without appearing to argue. You are much too skilled as a wordsmith to not know there are ways to write from a neutral viewpoint without conveying the author’s opinion. Advocacy writing is not new and, I am told, is routinely taught in journalism classes.

Stating that he SHOUTS a lot in tweets is fair comment. Comparing this to a monkey hurling shit is where it becomes an attack on a political candidate.
My concern is that, should Hillary win, Sophos will like her enough to weaken their stance on backdoors, since she has spoken in support of them.

Paul, as a security writer, your skills are definitely a cut above. However, you once again reveal your lack of understanding of American principles. You still wouldn’t be ticked off about that whole “Rebellion of the States” brouhaha a couple centuries ago, would you?

Well, I didn’t write the article. I wouldn’t have chosen the words that Lisa Vaas did, because that’s not my style. Indeed, I wouldn’t have written any of Lisa’s articles the way she did, or on the topics she did, but that’s why we have different writers with different styles. I accept that the “monkey dung” thing is, ah, an unusal choice of words, and as metaphors go it’s kind of weird. But to suggest that I don’t “understand American principles” because I don’t see an election year journalistic conspiracy theory in it…

As for my attitude to armed conflicts a couple of centuries back, I’m disappointed that you think I’m shallow enough thar war is something that might “tick me off.” (I assume you are referring to the US Civil War of 155 years ago, something I find both fascinating – the first war where what we’d call “modern technology” was part of the deal: ironclads, submarines, telegraphy, photojournalism – and more than usually tragic, as armed conflicts go, much like the English Civil War of a couple of centuries before that.)

I guess the bottom line is that I don’t like this article much, but I find it hard to see it as a politically manipulative piece. In my experience, political demagoguery disguised as unaffiliated content doesn’t look like that. But then I am not a demagogue.

I guess we just have to leave it at that.

I read Billy Reuben’s “Rebellion of the States” as speculative that you’re still seething because we didn’t remain British colonies.

It certainly wasn’t “Revolutionary” to Brits; what do they call it?

It’s the Anerican War of Independence, I think. I wasn’t born then so I have nothing to seethe about.

I did go to a bicentenary celebration when I was a little kid and won a duffel bag at the tombola stall. I was dead pleased with it and it served me well.

Comments are closed.

Subscribe to get the latest updates in your inbox.
Which categories are you interested in?