Breaking Down Survivor Political Views

I am a big fan of both Survivor and the Survivor-related podcasts on Rob Has a Podcast (RHAP). One of the weekly segments Rob does during the Survivor season is a voicemail segment with a guest host. Rob and his guest host spend about an hour each week answering questions related to the latest episode.

In a recent voicemail segment with Amy H, they talked about how it would be interesting to figure out what political candidates Survivor players are supporting in the upcoming elections as a way to help inform your own decision process. For example, if you respect a certain player in the game, would knowing who they are backing influence your decision about who to support politically?

I thought it might be interesting as well to know this information so I wrote a program to mine the Twitter accounts of over 200 Survivor contestants and look for politically related tweets to figure out who they are supporting.

To generate my lists of Survivor Twitter accounts, I used the Twitter API to pull all the accounts from Morgan Stradling’s Survivor player Twitter accounts list. This list was missing some accounts, so I combined it with some lists I found on Reddit.

Originally I was going to use the Twitter API to search through each player’s history for mentions of certain words and names, but unfortunately, besides rate limits, the API is also limited to about the last week’s worth of tweets. So instead, I wrote a program that would use Twitter’s Advanced Search Form to submit queries to search for what I wanted to find, and then automatically parse the HTML response to extract the tweets.

Once I collected all the relevant tweets, I compiled this information into an infographic. The infographic is displayed below. For a high resolution PDF version, follow this link.

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Hopefully you enjoyed this. I did this for fun and out of curiosity, so don’t take these things too seriously. If you enjoy this kind of thing, leave a comment or catch me on Twitter. Cheers.