Bluesky study mines 38.5M Trump posts, reveals 14 discourse themes
Researchers analyzed 38.5M Bluesky posts to map political discourse from 2019-2026.
A new academic study, "Echoes in the Sky," presents the largest computational analysis of political discourse on Bluesky to date. Researchers from University of Delaware and Aalto University used Bluesky's historical retrieval API to collect all available posts matching Trump-related keywords from 2019 to 2026, yielding a massive dataset of 38.5 million posts. By applying an LLM-assisted clustering pipeline combined with human validation, they identified 14 interpretable thematic domains in English-language posts and 19 thematic categories across 258 executive orders signed between January 20, 2025, and May 1, 2026.
The study, accepted at ASONAM 2026, reveals dominant themes like executive governance, political identity, and national security. In executive orders, recurring topics included task forces, border enforcement, and foreign policy. The researchers also tracked how public attention shifted over time, finding substantial variation in persistence and volatility across issues. Notably, the proportion of negative sentiment in Bluesky discourse increased steadily throughout the study period. The dataset and resources are publicly available, offering researchers and journalists a rich resource for understanding how decentralized social platforms respond to political events.
- 38.5M Bluesky posts analyzed from 2019-2026 using Bluesky's historical retrieval API
- Identified 14 thematic domains and 19 executive order categories with LLM-assisted clustering
- Found rising negative sentiment and volatile issue attention across 258 executive orders
Why It Matters
This study gives researchers and policymakers a data-driven view of how Bluesky shapes public political discourse and sentiment over time.