User:Piatigda/sandbox

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After claims in the media that the hashtags #wikileaks and #occupywallstreet were being censored because they did not show up on the site's list of trending topics, Twitter responded by stating that it does not censor hashtags unless they contain obscenities.

In 2016, at the same time as Twitter executives paid to attend a political fundraiser by Hillary Clinton, the Twitter platform banned a pro-Bernie Sanders account that had started a hashtag critical of Clinton's fundraising from wealthy donors.

World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter's rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy, the use of Twitter to engage with foreign publics and their own citizens. US Ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul has been attributed as a pioneer of international Twitter diplomacy. He used Twitter after becoming ambassador in 2011, posting in English and Russian. On October 24, 2014, Queen Elizabeth II sent her first tweet to mark the opening of the London Science Museum's Information Age exhibition. A 2013 study by website Twiplomacy found that 153 of the 193 countries represented at the United Nations had established government Twitter accounts. The same study also found that those accounts amounted to 505 Twitter handles used by world leaders and their foreign ministers, with their tweets able to reach a combined audience of over 106 million followers.

According to an analysis of accounts, the heads of state of 125 countries and 139 other leading politicians have Twitter accounts that have between them sent more than 350,000 tweets and have almost 52 million followers. However, only 30 of these do their own tweeting, more than 80 do not subscribe to other politicians and many do not follow any accounts.

Addition: 45th President of the United States Donald Trump has used Twitter as a method of providing ideas and information as a Presidential Candidate, Presidential Elect, and President during the 2016 election season and forward after his election. In a study performed at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology analyzed his tweets from these different time periods and through analysis of his tweets, the professors found that President Trump uses a mode called "forensic mode" the most often in his tweets. This is described as a quick reactive usage, as they found he often used Twitter to show his judgement of the events that occurred regarding both his allies and his enemies. After his election to the presidency he tweeted this "forensic-style" tweet, "Just had a very open and successful election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting.  Very Unfair!".

In a study done at New York University in 2015, an analysis and comparison of the twitter accounts of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, found observations showing the goals of each candidates twitter during their respective primary elections. Some comparisons that were made were the use of Aristotle's theory of Rhetoric. The research found that Donald Trump used pathos, the appeal to emotion, in his rhetoric; Bernie Sanders tended to use ethos and logos for his twitter; Hillary Clinton tended to use logos and pathos to try to convey her values, and Jeb Bush shows that he uses a mix off all three on his account. The study also looked at the media response to the twitters during the election. The study found that since tweets were meant to be persuasive, the tweets became more powerful for the candidates if the media put the tweets in front of billions of viewers, versus the fewer if it were only visible to those on twitter. Thereafter, presidential candidates that had their tweets covered more, were able to get their message to more potential voters.