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 July 11th to July 17th, 2019.

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

  1. ‘No shower, no shower!’: Migrants’ shouts greet Pence as he visits Texas detention centers | NBC News
  2. MAGA-themed wedding pays tribute to Trump | The New York Post
  3. Thousands Are Targeted as ICE Prepares to Raid Undocumented Migrant Families | The New York Times
  4. New book details how Republican leaders learned to stop worrying and love Trump | The Washington Post
  5. NYPD let convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein skip judge-ordered check-ins | The New York Post

The week’s top story was about Vice President Pence’s visit to immigrant detention centers in Texas. While the visit led to a significant amount of criticism directed towards the administration, it’s fair to assume that the happy couple who hosted a MAGA-themed wedding in the week’s second-top story didn’t partake in the disparagement.

Elsewhere, reporting on ICE raids and Jeffrey Epstein took the third and fifth spots, while a book review from The Washington Post slotted in at number four, largely due to the number of scathing responses it garnered from the Twitterati.

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #foxnews
  2. #MAGA
  3. #Trump
  4. #AmericaFirst
  5. #Epstein
  6. #FakeChristian
  7. #ICEraids
  8. #QAnon
  9. #Dobbs
  10. #WakeUpAmerica

While #foxnews and #maga kept a stranglehold on the week’s top two spots, we saw some new additions to the top ten hashtags of the week. Hashtags related to movement in the immigration crisis were particularly prevalent this week, divided into right-leaning (#AmericaFirst and #Dobbs) and left-leaning (#FakeChristian and #ICEraids) groups, while both sides got in shots using #WakeUpAmerica.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

Reactions to the week’s top stories inspired three of the most-shared tweets of the week, while the power of Twitter to shed light on underreported news–and trenchant commentary from relatively unknown contributors–was also on display.

1. A tweet that won’t make the wedding album 

2. An underreported tragedy

3. A perspective shift in 12 words

*Potentially offensive language is blurred in this tweet.

4. Enforcing rights

5. Shades of justice

Want more data-driven insights while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Read “Election 2020: Brands on the Ballot,” our latest special report that explores how brands can leverage data-driven analytics to thrive throughout the election cycle. 

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 July 11th to July 17th, 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 July 11th to July 17th, 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 July 11th to July 17th, 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 July 11th to July 17th, 2019, that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.