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 25th to July 31st, 2019.

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

  1. Sorry, childless millennials going to Disney World is weird | The New York Post
  2. Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset | The Washington Post
  3. No shower for 23 days: U.S. citizen says conditions were so bad that he almost self-deported | The Dallas Morning News
  4. See how the Avengers honor a fallen superhero in exclusive ‘Endgame’ deleted scene  | USA Today
  5. Dan Coats to Step Down as Intelligence Chief; Trump Picks Loyalist for Job | The New York Times

The New York Post continues its streak, again scoring the most-talked-about story of the week – a hard-hitting investigative scoop on, uh, young people having fun in ways of which older people don’t approve.

Elsewhere, an article on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to block a bill on measures to protect future elections saw him become the butt of a million jokes (see the top hashtags section for more), a development that didn’t bother him at all. Nope. Not even a little.

Finally, the remaining articles included a followup on a U.S. citizen who was detained for almost a month by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an Avengers Endgame reveal and news about a top government official’s departure.

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #endgame
  2. #moscowmitch
  3. #foxnews
  4. #demdebate
  5. #infested
  6. #MAGA
  7. #Trump
  8. #QAnon
  9. #Muellerhearings
  10. #btsarmy

#endgame dominated the week in hashtags as fans got all riled up about the release of the movie – and a number of deleted scenes – on DVD. As if that wasn’t enough for #foxnews, which found itself out of the number 1 spot for the first time in quite a while, it didn’t even grab second place – that honor went to #MoscowMitch, as gleeful Democrats made hay with the Washington Post’s opinion piece on the Senate Majority Leader.

Politics dominated most of the rest of the hashtags for the week, with #demdebate and #Muellerhearings both charting. One notable exception was #btsarmy, which rose to prominence when fans of K-Pop outfit BTS used it as part of their protest against the decision not to nominate their favorite popular hit combo in any of the mainstream categories for the VMA awards. 

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

The top two tweets of the week are both related to top news items, but in different ways. The number one tweet – a response to the New York Post’s Disney World hot take – is the kind of sarcastic, easily-RT-able snark we’ve come to expect anytime someone pops off at millennials in the media. Unusually, however, the second most popular tweet of the week is a straight “news” item, from a publisher – albeit one debuting an exclusive Endgame clip to an audience of ecstatic fans.

The remainder of the week’s top five, meanwhile, feature responses to the update about the U.S. citizen held in immigrant detention, a story about serious police misconduct and the lesser-spotted President Trump-A$AP Rocky nexus.

1. Millennials are killing Disney World?

2. Superhero superfans

3. An observation on citizen detention

4. An awful, significant clarification

5. Clapback re: A$AP

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 25th to July 31st, 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 25th to July 31st, 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 25th to July 31st, 2019, ranked by number of mentions from that date range.