2016 U.S. Presidential Election Tweet IDs, 280 Million Tweets from July-November 2016

Approximately 280 million tweet IDs related to the 2016 United States presidential election, collected by Justin Littman of George Washington University between July 13, 2016 and November 10, 2016. The data is organized into 12 collections covering candidates, parties, conventions, debates, and election day, gathered via the Twitter REST and Stream APIs. The tweet IDs require hydration to retrieve the full tweet content.

Use Cases

• Study political discourse and sentiment on Twitter based on election-related tweet collections.
• Analyze information spread and network dynamics during key events like presidential debates and conventions.
• Research platform manipulation or bot activity using the large-scale, time-stamped tweet ID corpus.
• Track candidate and party messaging strategies via the user timeline collections.

Strengths

• Approximately 280 million tweet IDs provide a large-scale corpus for analysis.
• Data collection covers a defined 4-month period around a major election, offering temporal context.
• The 12 collections are organized by specific events and actors, allowing for targeted study.

Limitations

• Tweet IDs require hydration; a significant portion of tweets may be unavailable due to deletions or account suspensions.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download and hydration.
• The description notes there may be duplicate tweets across the different collections.

Provenance

Source

George Washington University

Collection Method

Collected from the Twitter API using Social Feed Manager, via REST API user_timeline and Stream API filter methods.

Time Range

July 13, 2016 to November 10, 2016

Geography

United States (implied by topic)