[Applause]
we have people coming into our country
that are looking to do tremendous harm
exactly one year ago today I did my best
to explore the way Donald Trump answers
a question his use of language in speech
I thought was fascinating and unique and
illuminated why he's so successful at
selling a feeling now that Trump has
been president-elect for 50 days we
don't get to hear much of Trump's speech
anymore his interview appearances are
dwindling and his press conferences are
non-existent but that doesn't mean he
stopped using a manipulating language
these days the language that Trump puts
on the public record comes largely from
writing specifically from writing on
Twitter in 140 character notes as of
December 29th 2016 Trump has tweeted 221
times as the president-elect it's
important to note at the outset that
these tweets come largely from a few
sources thanks to info from the metadata
we know that of the 221 153 or 69
percent come from an Android phone
Trump's personal Samsung Galaxy 59 or 27
percent come from an iPhone and 9 or 4%
come from the Twitter web client as in
someone typing the tweets into a
computer a number of commentators and
data analysts have surmised that the
iPhone tweets are not written by Trump
himself but by his staff I think that's
almost certainly true if you look at
those tweets exclusively you capture all
of the announcements and cabinet picks
as well as the holiday messages and the
notes of condolence of those 59 tweets
49 share links or our retweets and all
or almost all of them are likely written
by Dan's Gavino Trump's director of
social media or Brad parse scale a
website designer turn high-level staffer
who Trump and trusted with tweeting for
him during the presidential debates of
the 153 tweets that come from Trump's
personal samsung not one shares a link
so that's a good rule of thumb if you
want to determine which tweets are from
him and which are the huge majority of
the Android tweets are Trump's personal
thoughts or reactions and you can split
them up in a few ways for example for
of those are positive or congratulatory
in tone 94 are negative or critical in
tone and 19 are pretty much neutral like
in a speech one thing Trump is really
really good at is emotionally framing
his tweets and most of them are
emotionally charged which is why 87% of
them are negative or positive in tone
Trump doesn't want a sympathetic reader
to spend any time at all deciphering how
to feel about what he's saying a lot of
people have mocked the way he concludes
tweets with one or two-word exclamations
like sad or too bad but these
punctuation czar actually powerful
framing devices that lubricate the
content of his message they also reflect
the key insight that Trump has knowingly
or unknowingly about Twitter and texting
as a form of communication while tweets
are technically a kind of writing
scholars have long theorized that
computer mediated communication more
closely resembles speech than writing
where funky punctuation substitutes for
conversational cues for example every
time you see someone extender word by
adding letter saying I'm so sad or I
love Breaking Bad what they're
essentially doing is trying to transmit
some emotional content that would have
existed in face-to-face conversation
instant messages text messages and
tweets attract these speech-like
qualities and and Donald Trump
understands this while he doesn't extend
words with extra letters his punctuation
at the end of tweets are extremely
speech like fifty one of his 153
personal tweets end with exclamations
like this in 95 there is at least one
exclamation point where his opponents
and other politicians write through
Twitter Trump speaks through it instead
of asking us to read he forces us to
hear but all of this begs the important
question what's the point
Trump is no longer a candidate he
doesn't have to persuade us to vote for
him I mean you could spend a lot of time
looking at a tweet like this from the
president-elect of the United States
scratching your head you could wonder
about the message or the distraction it
causes or the headlines it generates but
if that's the way you think
man will always baffle you Trump doesn't
resemble other politicians on Twitter he
resembles the rest of us he resembles
that person you know on Facebook who is
posting all the time about how happy
they are these people don't tweet or
post because they're trying to relay
relevant information they do it to
carefully craft their own identities
against some imagined audience that
exists only to reinforce what they need
to believe the media and the public act
like Trump's tweets contained messages
that were meant to receive when the
truth is I think that he's not thinking
of us at all when you look at it through
this lens Trump's Twitter account makes
a lot more sense it makes sense that a
lot of his congratulatory tweets are
self congratulatory and his negative
tweets which account for an astounding
majority are personal and their attacks
and sense of victimization and it makes
sense that we should react to it so
strongly we're all in this age of social
media intimately familiar with this kind
of behavior we do it ourselves every day
what we're not familiar with not yet at
least
is this kind of thing from the most
powerful person in the world how it will
fall out when you hold a position where
even your words desperately tweeted into
the void have global impact but give it
time and we will be
they are going to be tons more
nerdwriter episodes in 2017 so if you
want to join this crazy thing that I
started five years ago you can click
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videos I really am so excited for next
year I want to level up the show make
content that you have not seen anywhere
else on YouTube or the rest of the world
and I'm really excited to bring that to
you guys I'm working really hard to do
it I have to thank crunchyroll for
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the comments thank you guys so much I
will see all of you next year I'm so
excited