How did the volume of Twitter discussion of each 2020 Democratic presidential candidate change during/after the first #DemDebate? Tweets about Warren spiked during the debate. Castro, O'Rourke, Booker, and Gabbard show a substantial increase after vs before.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We updated this analysis following the second #demdebate. Activity for Kamala Harris spiked during the debate, and she remained the most frequently-mentioned candidate as of 11 hours later.

We used VADER sentiment analysis to analyze the degree to which traffic mentioning each candidate was positive or negative. With a few exceptions, sentiment toward the candidates was more positive after the debates than before.

For the sake of readability, here's the same figure with the lines removed and the average sentiment score for tweets mentioning each candidate halfway between the debates added (candidates who did not debate are not shown.)

Next, we looked at the degree of automation present in the tweets mentioning each candidate. Most are unremarkable (3% is generally a good baseline), but @JayInslee is a sizable outlier, with 22.3% of tweets mentioning him being automated. What's up?

The majority of the automated traffic mentioning Jay Inslee is posted via an app called "Blue Sandbox" and originates with a single account, @ActNow_Climate. This bot has a disclaimer on its profile indicating that it is "not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee."

Authorized or no, @ActNow_Climate shows a clear preference when it comes to candidates. 99.99% of its tweets link to Jay Inslee's website, and it has tweets promoting his candidacy that it has repeated verbatim literally thousands of times.

One more comment on @ActNow_Climate: its creation (and the creation of its accompanying website, which is focused on presenting Jay Inslee as a good candidate on climate issues) precede his campaign announcement by several days.

Moving on to news sources, here are the media websites most often linked from the tweets mentioning the candidates and the three candidates whose names most commonly appear in tweets linking each. Harris, Warren, Sanders, Biden, and Gabbard turn up most frequently.