How Iran keeps topping Trending Topics in Cable News Twitter (1/29/15)

Cable News Trending Topics for 2015-01-29

Once again Obama and Iran ended up at the top of the trending topics.  I wanted to know why Iran is showing up, given that there’s very little actual news these days about the country or the talks.  It turns out that it’s pretty much what happens when no topics really dominate the news — a few tweets that target the media as a whole get heavily retweeted. In this case, we have tweets like these:

The original sender is in Iran and is unlikely to be responding to CNN or Fox News; rather, they are carpet bombing Twitter.  If it were a heavy news day, these would be lost, but on a quiet day they rise to the top.  When you combine that with some more organic content, like this tweet…

… you end up topping the topics for the day.
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A Blizzard of comments dominates Cable News Twitter on Monday, 1/26/15

Cable News Trending Topics for 2015-01-26

The Blizzard dominated the conversation on Cable News Twitter on Monday, as you would expect, unless you, like I, live in Florida, in which case the fact that the temperature topped out in the 60s was more newsworthy.

Raw data: 2015-01-26-TagStats.csv and 2015-01-26-WordStats.csv

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