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 September 26th to October 2nd, 2019.

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

  1. Barr personally asked foreign officials to aid inquiry into CIA, FBI activities in 2016 | The Washington Post
  2. Trump Pressed Australian Leader to Help Barr Investigate Mueller Inquiry’s Origins | The New York Times
  3. State Dept. intensifies email probe of Hillary Clinton’s former aides | The Washington Post
  4. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border | The New York Times
  5. N.R.A.’s LaPierre Asks Trump to ‘Stop the Games’ Over Gun Legislation in Discussion About Its Support | The New York Times

Judging by our top five headlines, it’s been a bad week for the Trump administration. As might be expected, the top two articles concern details related to the recently-announced impeachment inquiry.

However, that isn’t the only issue affecting the White House at present: a story about the NRA taking the President to task, and a piece about some controversial ideas for dissuading migrants from crossing the border, were also featured. Notably, the migrant story has, at the time of writing, cracked the top five despite having only been published within the last 24 hours. 

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #BTS
  2. #JHope
  3. #FoxNews
  4. #QuidProJoe
  5. #Trump
  6. #Impeachment
  7. #Kashmir
  8. #Kashmiris
  9. #ImranKhan
  10. #India

While the top stories may have been dominated by politics, the world of hashtags was turned on its head this week by K-Pop outfit #BTS. Frequently compared to the Beatles, the group found itself trending this week on the back of a feature in the Hollywood Reporter, plus the release of a solo effort from one of its members – #JHope.

Those twin events managed something that we haven’t seen in awhile – #FoxNews was pushed off the top spot, down to third. Political scandal did make some impact, however, with both #QuidProJoe (an attempt by the Trump administration to deflect attention away from their own Ukrainian dealings) and #Impeachment making the top ten. International news dominated the bottom half of the last, with hashtags related to the situation in Kashmir taking the final four spots. 

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

Unusually, the list of the week’s top tweets bears no resemblance to the list of top stories over the past seven days. Korean pop star J-Hope – a member of mega-popular BTS – set the standard this week with an attempt to create a viral dance craze that, by the looks of it, is set to be a roaring success.

A pair of reactions to a single story take the second and third spots, and provide yet another reminder of the power of social media to amplify voices, surface important events and even criticize media coverage.

Finally, the remaining two tweets of the week take us back into the political realm, with a Trump heir weighing in on cozy father-son relationships in the political sphere, and a scathing piece of commentary from ThinkProgress’ Neera Tanden on the different approaches to Congressional inquiries taken by key members of the Trump and Obama administrations.

1. A dance challenge goes viral

2. Reaction to an awful story, part one…

3. …and part two.

4. A famous son weighs in on the Bidens

5. Contrast in styles

Want more data-driven insights while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Read our Emmys post-show analysis, check out tips for your 2020 comms budget planning, or learn more about the new partnership between the NFL and Reddit via our data-driven analysis.

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 September 26th to October 2nd, 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 September 26th to October 2nd, 2019, 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 September 26th to October 2nd, 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 September 26th to October 2nd, 2019, that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.