Thread by @conspirator0

Does ilovemyfreedom(dot)org's stated mission of providing positive coverage of Trump match the reality, or have the site's operators taken the easy road and settled for negative reporting on his opponents instead?

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We used ilovemyfreedom(dot)org's official Twitter account (@ILMFOrg) to compile a list of the headlines posted on the site since 1/2018. 74.9% of headlines mention one of the people/organizations shown here, and Democrats (mostly female) are mentioned more frequently than Trump.

We can get a statistical sense of the emotion expressed in the ilovemyfreedom(dot)org headlines mentioning each candidate by using sentiment analysis. First, a brief overview of how to interpret the results (full explanation of the algorithm in this paper)
comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm14…

Vader sentiment analysis calculates a score between -1 (most negative) and 1 (most positive) for each piece of text (in this case, a headline). It is effective at calculating overall tone, but won't tell you who/what the text is positive or negative toward.

This figure shows the distribution of sentiment scores for ilovemyfreedom(dot)org headlines containing each name. All of them trend negative, but some (mostly Democrats, with some weird outliers) are more negative than others.

How do headlines from other news sources compare? We performed the same test on eleven others. Right-wing sites with the exception of Fox show almost entirely negative scores, while Western MSM is more mixed in tone. RT/Sputnik are somewhere in between.

What other news sources are shared by Twitter accounts that link ilovemyfreedom(dot)org? By and large, other right wing sites that show similar patterns in terms of headline sentiment (almost entirely negative, especially when Dems are mentioned.)