Trump Calls SNL Impression “Unwatchable” – Do People Agree?

Saturday Night Live has a long history of Presidential parodies, and President-Elect Trump is no exception. Alec Baldwin has been doing his impression of Trump on the long-running comedy sketch series since before the election. However, while SNL parodies have no doubt made past Presidents uncomfortable, no U.S. President has been as outspoken as Trump. After Saturday’s show, the President Elect took to Twitter (for the third time) to voice his displeasure.

Here is the sketch, which pokes fun at Trump’s heavy Twitter usage.

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With the inauguration less than two months away, the most important opinion belongs to the American people. The country was extremely divided in the presidential election—but is it divided over the issue of a presidential Twitter account? And what do the people think about Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression? Is it really so unwatchable?

With that in mind, researchers at Unanimous AI decided to ask a Swarm Intelligence its opinion on both SNL’s impression of Donald Trump and on his use of his Twitter account in general. These researchers posed a series of questions to a group of 30 American citizens of mixed age and gender working together as a “Swarm.” UNU is a Swarm Intelligence platform that lets people think together as a closed-loop system, using swarming algorithms to converge on optimized answers. In other words, they influence each other’s decision-making process by the strength of their convictions and the time it takes them to weigh in.

First The Swarm was asked what it thought of Alec Baldwin’s SNL Trump impression.

trump impression ent

The Swarm actually disagrees with Trump on whether or not Baldwin is entertaining. They seem to think Baldwin’s killing it with his impression, whether they voted for Trump or not. So while Trump doesn’t like it, it seems that the American public can find something to laugh about.

But is Baldwin’s Trump impression fair?

trump impression fair

Not only did the 31 Swarmers feel Baldwin’s Trump impression was entertaining, they also thought it was fair (by a lot) when given choices along the fairness spectrum. So Trump’s opinion that the impression is biased is not shared by the public.

So does the Swarm think that Trump’s criticism of Baldwin’s SNL impression is inappropriate?

trump twitter unprez

 

 

Not really. Here the Swarm underscores the real issue at hand: Is tweeting about your political enemies or the media a presidential thing to do? This is truly the first time in history such an option has even existed, so the public’s opinion is important for future political leaders to heed.

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The Swarm participants took more time with this question, waffling and exerting influence on each other to draw opinion away from “he’s entitled to his own opinion” to “it’s okay, but it’s really not presidential.” But the real insight was how little support “completely inappropriate” received. While the media is condemning Trump for his Twitter outbursts, the Swarm felt it was OK for Trump to voice some displeasure.

Should Trump continue to use Twitter to respond to media criticism?

 

trump twitter respond

When asked whether Trump should use Twitter in the future to address media criticism, the Swarm strongly stated that Trump shouldn’t (by a lot). While this may seem contradictory to the previous question, the takeaway is that while Trump may be justified in voicing his opinion, it’s ultimately not worth it, especially considering how much media criticism he had to endure.

Finally, how should Trump use Twitter, if at all?

trump delete account

 

So much so in fact, that the Swarm literally felt that Trump should avoid the criticism altogether by abandoning Twitter. They converged almost immediately on the opinion that President Trump would be best off just deleting @realDonaldTrump.

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