References to the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, formed a dominant theme among the critical, often taunting and occasionally vulgar tweets bearing the WhyImNotVotingForHillary hashtag that trended high on Twitter Sunday after Hillary Clinton announced her campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Out of just over 7,000 tweets bearing the hashtag and gathered between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. Monday, 938 connected Clinton to the attack, which occurred while Clinton was secretary of state. The attack left U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three colleagues dead.
Fewer, but still many, tweets referenced Clinton’s deletion of what she said were personal e-mails that had been commingled with official ones in an account she had used during her tenure as secretary of state.
Still other tweets called her a liar, emphasized her ties to President Barack Obama, or characterized her as bent on confiscating Americans’ guns. A number mentioned two or more of these themes.
The chart shows the frequency of the five top themes in tweets bearing the WhyImNotVotingForHillary hashtag collected between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. Central Daylight Savings Time.
Several tweets referenced pantsuits or “cankles,” called Clinton a “granny” or falsely implied she is an alcoholic or has Alzheimer’s disease. About 150 of the tweets called Clinton a “witch” or used even more vulgar terms.
The two most commonly shared photos compared Clinton to Adolph Hitler (133 of the tweets) and suggested some of Clinton’s supporters favor her mainly because she is a woman (114 of the tweets).
The most frequently tweeted link led to a Top Right News article saying that the hashtag, which mocked Clinton’s campaign ad, had joined #GameofThrones as the social media network’s most popular hashtags, leaving #Hillary2016 in an “embarrassing” third place.
“Sounds a lot like 2007, when the heir-apparent Hillary assumed she could just breeze into the White House, but it did not exactly go as planned,” the article said, going on to characterize her campaign ad as “cringeworthy.”
The second-most-tweeted link among the tweets examined led to a Townhall.com article about a lawsuit seeking e-mails Clinton sent while serving as secretary of state.
Sixty-six percent of the tweets examined came from users who had sent multiple tweets. The most prolific user, @denisedr58, sent 105 tweets during the three-hour period, a rate of between one and two per minute. The account is registered to Denise Rodgers, who, according to the account’s profile, is “Married, Christian, Conservative, Tea Party, Texan by way of KY” and has sent nearly 19,000 tweets since creating the account in May 2009.