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 articles, stories and authors of the week.

Here’s what was trending on Twitter from June 20th to June 26th, 2019.

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

  1. ‘There Is a Stench’: Soiled Clothes and No Baths for Migrant Children at a Texas Center | The New York Times
  2. Trump admin’s ‘tent cities’ cost more than keeping migrant kids with parents | NBC News
  3. Strike on Iran Approved by Trump, Then Abruptly Pulled Back | The New York Times
  4. ICE raids targeting migrant families slated to start Sunday in major U.S. cities | The Washington Post
  5. We went to a border detention center for children. What we saw was awful | CNN

A single theme dominates this week’s top news items, from multiple publishers: immigration and the impact of government policies on the lives of migrant children. The New York Times produced the most-talked-about piece of the week, as well as the only piece in the top five about a non-immigration issue: the story of how a military strike against Iran was approved and then abruptly overturned.

The 10 Most Influential Authors of the Week

  1. CNN
  2. The New York Times
  3. The Washington Post
  4. Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1)
  5. MSNBC
  6. Reuters Top News
  7. Bloomberg
  8. NBC News
  9. CNN en Español
  10. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC)

The biggest change to this week’s top ten influencers is the re-appearance of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Only one of two individuals in the top ten (aside from ever-present MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin), AOC made it back into our list by leveraging Twitter to weigh in on the migrant crisis.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

The most shared Tweets of the week all concern the emerging treatment of migrant children. Leaving the subject matter of the Tweets aside, the order – and intersections – of this week’s top Tweets is a keen lesson on how big names can amplify a message far beyond the reach of the individual who originally posted it.

1. A plea from Chris Evans that amplifies…

2. …a tweet from New York Times immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson

3. Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates weighs in

4. Both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and…

5. ….musician Mikel Jollett amplify a tweet from former U.S. Attorney Joyce Alene

Want more data-driven insights while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Download our latest special report, check out our Resource Center and get in touch with our team.

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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 June 20, 2019 to June 26, 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 June 20, 2019 to June 26, 2019, ranked by number of mentions from that date range.
The “Top 10 Most Influential Authors of the Week “ are the ten authors who saw the most engagement on Twitter around Tweets related to news stories published by the above-mentioned publications from June 20, 2019 to June 26, 2019, ranked by number of engagements 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 June 20, 2019 to June 26, 2019, that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.