Welcome to this week’s edition of The Labs Report, your one-stop, data-driven shop to quickly get up to speed on the most important and influential stories of the week.

Here’s what was trending on Twitter from October 24th to October 30th, 2019.

The Five Most-Talked-About News Stories of the Week

  1. Justice Dept. Is Said to Open Criminal Inquiry Into Its Own Russia Investigation  | The New York Times
  2. Army Officer Who Heard Trump’s Ukraine Call Reported Concerns | The New York Times
  3. Man charged after trying to ‘barbecue all the child molesters’ | The New York Post
  4. White House Ukraine Expert Sought to Correct Transcript of Trump Call | The New York Times
  5. Rudy Giuliani butt-dials NBC reporter, heard discussing need for cash and trashing Bidens | NBC News

Once again, the various activities of the Trump administration and its immediate orbit were key news topics across Twitter this week. The New York Times’s piece on the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the roots of the Mueller Report (a product of the Justice Department itself) was perhaps the obvious choice for the most-talked-about piece of the week. 

The New York Post managed to score the only top piece of the week with a grisly story that, nevertheless, became the source of thousands of jokes and pithy comments (see the most shared tweets of the week below).

Finally, Rudy Giuliani once again found himself the butt on the receiving end of an unfathomable number of comments and jibes following a phone-related mishap that just happened to connect him with an NBC reporter. Proof positive that sometimes the story just falls into your lap. Or out of someone else’s.  

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #FoxNews
  2. #Trump
  3. #MAGA
  4. #StandWithHongKong
  5. #Impeachment
  6. #ImpeachTrump
  7. #OneVoice1
  8. #China
  9. #ImpeachBarr
  10. #ThursdayThoughts

It was a slow week on the top hashtag front. Aside from #ImpeachBarr,  the week’s most-used hashtags are largely a collection of terms that we’ve seen many times before, although #StandWithHongKong and #China do give us a sense that there are non-impeachment-related items that resonated with people around the world. 

Elsewhere, #ThursdayThoughts feels like something of a throwback to simpler times on Twitter – when #FollowFriday was a staple that actually led to people getting new followers. And, in another sign of just how much Twitter has changed in recent years, #ButtDial inexplicably did not make the top ten.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week 

The week’s most shared tweets once again proved that the Twitterati live in a very different world than the rest of the news-consuming public. While impeachment-related news and wildfires led traditional media coverage, top tweets this week ran the gamut from tasteless jokes on attempted murder to a conservative activist confronting a panel at a conference to tweets about – checks notes – rats driving tiny cars.

1. The very definition of a hot tweet

2. Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard chimes in

3. Adam Schiff senses a change in momentum

4. An activist speaks out

5. A nightmare, just in time for Hallowe’en…

*Potentially offensive language is blurred in this tweet.

 

Want more while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Check out our latest special report, “The Next Decade of Communications: Data Analytics Trends and Takeaways for 2020 and Beyond.”

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Methodology: The data which drives this series, provided by the Zignal Labs platform, is informed by a 10% sampling of Twitter activity around news stories published from October 24th to October 30th, 2019. Stories are published by 25 of the most highly-read publications across the country (based on circulation data), including: ABC News, Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, CBS News, The Chicago Tribune, CNN, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, Fox News, The Houston Chronicle, Huffington Post, The LA Times, MSNBC, NBC News, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times, Newsday, Reuters, The Seattle Times, The Star Tribune, The Tampa Bay News, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
The “Top 5 Most-Talked-About Stories of the Week” are the five stories from the above-mentioned publications that received the most mentions across Twitter from October 24th to October 30th, 2019, ranked by number of mentions from that date range.
The “Ten Most Used Hashtags of the Week “ are the ten hashtags that were mentioned the most on Twitter around Tweets related to news stories published by the above-mentioned publications from October October 24th to October 30th, 2019, ranked by number of mentions from that date range.
The “Top Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week” are the five Tweets, related to news stories published by the above-mentioned publications from October 24th to October 30th, 2019 that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.