Donald Trump behaves as a ‘bachelor’ while operating his social media accounts

The 45th US President Donald Trump may not love to tweet about this but scientists do have a surprising news for him: The 70-year-old Trump who is actually married appears

single if his boisterous behaviour on social media is taken into account. A team from ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and National University of Singapore created an algorithm that predicts user marital status with 86 per cent precision using data from three social networks – Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.

While testing, the programme – which can examine any English-speaking account – identified Trump as single. According to the developers, this inconsistency came up because of Trump’s abnormal activity in the media – “the US President and his assistants use Twitter like a bachelor”. To reach this conclusion, Andrey Filchenkov, associate professor of Computer Technology Department at ITMO University collected and analysed tweets of former US President Barack Obama and Trump.

Based on this data, the algorithm confirmed Obama’s marital status but concluded that Trump is a bachelor. This irregularity can be explained by the fact that Trump himself does not update his social media accounts. “We all know about his wife Melania. But, in this case, we are studying whether all Trump’s assistants are married or not. We are not guessing who Trump is, but who runs his social media,” the researchers wrote.

According to the team, profiling users through several social networks rather than just one makes it possible to learn specific details about individuals. Combining the data from Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, they taught the algorithm to predict this parameter with 86 per cent precision, 17 per cent higher than using just one social network. “Many scientific sources associate a person psychological type with his marital status. So, we decided to check how precisely we can predict this parameter to use it for making human psychological portraits in the future,” added Kseniya Buraya, researcher at ITMO University who is doing an internship at National University of Singapore.

User profiling, according to the scientists, can have a wide range of applications. For example, recruiters can learn more about people who are applying for a job. More generally, characterising personality through activity in social media will help discover illegal groups as well as find people prone to depression or suicide and support them. The study was recently reported at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco.