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 31st to November 6th, 2019.

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

  1. Sean Doolittle on declining White House invite: ’I don’t want to hang out with somebody who talks like that’  | The Washington Post
  2. White House lawyer moved transcript of Trump call to classified server after Ukraine adviser raised alarms | The Washington Post
  3. Mulvaney Summoned to Testify in Impeachment Inquiry | The New York Times
  4. Opinion | Only now do we understand the true cruelty of Trump’s family separation | The Washington Post
  5. Trump, Lifelong New Yorker, Declares Himself a Resident of Florida | The New York Times

In the week where the Washington Nationals won their first-ever World Series, it makes sense that three of the week’s most-talked-about stories would be from the team’s hometown paper, The Washington Post. And, while the most popular story may seem to be about baseball, it’s really about the subject of every other piece in the top five: President Donald J. Trump. 

(The baseball connection, for those keeping score at home, is a story about one of the Nationals’ players publicly declaring his intention not to attend the recent celebration for the team at the White House.)

Subject-wise, impeachment ruled the roost, with The New York Times and the Post scoring one spot each with articles on different facets of the fast-moving – and suddenly very public – inquiry. The Times also made a splash with a piece on the President’s plans for his post-politics abode.

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #FoxNews
  2. #HongKong
  3. #DefendOurDemocracy
  4. #Trump
  5. #OneVoice1
  6. #StandWithHongKong
  7. #Impeachment
  8. #ImpeachTrump
  9. #TuesdayThoughts
  10. #MAGA

With pop outfit #BTS apparently not having been up to much this week, #FoxNews once again found itself atop the week’s hashtag rankings. However, in an indication of how bad the news cycle has been for the President, the ever-present #MAGA dropped all the way to tenth place this week, behind no less than three specifically pro-impeachment hashtags in #DefendOurDemocracy, #Impeachment and #ImpeachTrump.

Elsewhere, #HongKong is still a subject on the minds of a lot of Twitter users – many of whom have pledged to continue #StandWithHongKong as the territory’s future seems ever more uncertain.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

Given the tenor of the top stories, it should come as no surprise that the week’s most shared tweets were largely dominated by stories about politics and impeachment. Snark about a logo change at Facebook showed that not everything in Twitter-land was deadly serious this week, but the majority of the top tweets dealt with matters of grave concern.

The most-shared tweet, while also sarcastic in tone, dealt with the extremely serious issue of racial bias in a health care company’s algorithm, while elsewhere, Rachel Maddow weighed in on immigrant family separation, the President sought to defend himself on impeachment and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig suggested that the time for that may be passing. 

1. Bias is in the code

2. Has Zuck never read an internet etiquette guide?

3. Rachel Maddow amplifies the Post’s editorial

4. The impeachment process is a sham…

5. …or is it?

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.”

Be sure to also take a read through our latest Story of a Hashtag analysis on #TeamTrees, learn how you can become the adoption champion your team needs and peruse tips for your 2020 budget planning.

Be sure to also visit our Resource Center and get in touch with our team to find out more about how Zignal Labs can help you build and protect your brand.

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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 31st to November 6th, 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 31st to November 6th, 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 31st to November 6th, 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 31st to November 6th, 2019 that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.