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 5th to September 11th, 2019.

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

  1. Exclusive: US extracted top spy from inside Russia in 2017 | CNN
  2. Commerce Chief Threatened Firings at NOAA After Trump’s Dorian Tweets, Sources Say | The New York Times
  3. Trump tries to force Ukraine to meddle in the 2020 election | The Washington Post
  4. Trump Had Deal With Scotland Airport That Sent Flight Crews to His Resort | The New York Times
  5. Mom accidentally shoots daughter after she surprises her at home | The New York Post

In the week leading up to the third round Democratic debates, each of the candidates’ policy proposals has been getting lots of attention and analysis. Just kidding – this week has been all about the Trump administration, with a variety of scandals sucking up all of the media oxygen.

The biggest story was CNN’s bombshell about a top spy being extracted from Russia (since denied by the administration). That was followed by a New York Times story on Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross threatening NOAA employees’ livelihoods for contradicting the president, a Washington Post story on potential 2020 election meddling and another New York Times piece on some unorthodox refueling and hospitality procedures for Air Force flights passing over the UK.

While there’s relief from scandal in the final top story of the week, there’s not a lot of room for levity – it’s a piece about an Ohio mom who accidentally shot her own daughter during a surprise visit home from college. 

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #FoxNews
  2. #Trump
  3. #MoscowMitch
  4. #MAGA
  5. #MondayMorning
  6. #OneVoice1
  7. #TheResistance
  8. #ImpeachTrump
  9. #SharpieGate
  10. #Brexit

The majority of the week’s top hashtags revolve around the ongoing rift in US politics, with plenty of representation on both sides of the divide. Notable exceptions include people from all sides coming together to marvel at the ongoing chaos being wrought by #Brexit, all the memes borne from #SharpieGate after the President drew on a forecast map for Hurricane Dorian and the multi-purpose #MondayMorning, which seems to transcend political boundaries with motivational examples to help get you through another week.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

Four of this week’s top five tweets are about stories that didn’t surface in either of our other categories. Of course, the one tweet that did reference a top story also happens to be the most shared tweet of the week – a riff on The New York Post’s story about a mother accidentally shooting her own daughter.

In other top tweets, Members of Congress Mark Takano (@RepMarkTakano) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) scored serious political points with vastly different messaging, while the third and fourth most shared tweets of the week both found pithy ways to sum up and drive attention to stories that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

1. Hunger pains

*Potentially offensive language is blurred in this tweet.

2. Creative criticism

3. Double standards

4. An anime reference

*Potentially offensive language is blurred in this tweet.

5. AOC weighs in on conversion therapy

Want more data-driven insights while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Read our preview blog for the third Democratic debate, check out our Story of a Hashtag blog post to learn more about the rise of #MoscowMitch, or find out which of the four major American sports leagues dominates conversation on Twitter (and why).

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 5th to September 11th, 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 5th to September 11th, 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 5th to September 11th, 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 5th to September 11th, 2019, that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.