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 August 8th to August 14th, 2019.

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

  1. Sobbing 11-year-old girl begs for dad’s release after massive ICE raid | CBS News
  2. Meet the Thai actor who helped make a baby sea cow an internet star | CNN
  3. Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Jail, Spurring Inquiries | The New York Times
  4. Diabetic groom to be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding | The New York Post
  5. U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act | The New York Times

The week’s top story went to CBS News’ coverage of the impact of ICE raids in Mississippi – a subject that would also lead to one of the top tweets of the week (see below). Also making both lists was a story from CNN about a baby sea cow – and a wider environmental message – that went viral thanks to Thai actor Alex Rendell.

The New York Times scored two of the remaining top spots with stories about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, and a move by the U.S. government that is pretty much the antithesis to CNN’s environment-related piece. 

The 10 Most Used Hashtags of the Week

  1. #foxnews
  2. #medicareforall
  3. #MAGA
  4. #Epstein
  5. #Kashmir
  6. #Trump
  7. #JeffreyEpstein
  8. #EpsteinSuicide
  9. #KAG
  10. #Clintonbodycount

Hashtags around Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide dominated the week, with #clintonbodycount (a hashtag popular with conspiracy theorists) and three others taking four of the top spots.

Right-leaning hashtags also had a strong week, with #foxnews, #MAGA, #trump and #kag all featured prominently. For those keeping score, the only left-leaning item on the list was #medicareforall, with #kashmir also trending due to the current political difficulties in the contested region between India and Pakistan.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

If this week’s top tweet looks familiar, that’s because it also appeared in our July 24th roundup, but with one key difference – it was published by Twitter user @brycemckenney1. This week’s number one tweet, co-opted by Twitter user @trapppo, has gained 50% more retweets and almost twice as many likes than its source tweet to date. 

The rest of the week’s top tweets all responded to items in our top five news items, with the unusual occurrence of a tweet written in a foreign language emerging as one of the top items of the week.

1. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

2. Long-term consequences

3. A feel-good environmental story

4. The case for healthcare reform

5. Lots of love for sea cows this week

Want more data-driven insights while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Check out our latest Debates Debrief blog or read “Election 2020: Brands on the Ballot,” our 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 August 8th to August 14th, 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 August 8th to August 14th, 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 August 8th to August 14th, 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 August 8th to August 14th, 2019, that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.