More than seven out of every ten Tweets sent in the last four weeks by American voters are in favour of the Trump campaign, according to an independent analysis of Twitter.

The BJSS strategic design consultancy - SPARCK - analysed 14 million Tweets, in real-time, to reveal a split of 74 to 26 per cent in favour of Donald Trump, contradicting opinion polls which have suggested that sentiment is roughly evenly split.

“The difference in results between opinion polls and Twitter is especially interesting to us,” says Simon Sear, Practice Leader at SPARCK. “We see two reasons for this. The election has been particularly susceptible to Twitter bots in favour of the Trump campaign. We are also picking up signals that Trump supporters, frustrated at the perception of a media bias, are using Twitter as an alternative broadcast platform.”

The SPARCK team set out to see if it could quickly implement a solution to complement the data analytics market. In two weeks a re-useable solution was built to monitor and display the results of any real-time event. The SPARCK data analysis tool can be set up in hours to monitor events such as live political polling, product launches, television broadcasts and sporting events.

This campaign commenced at 14:00BST, 03/10/2016.

Data correct as of 10:30GMT, 04/11/2016:

Total number of Tweets: 13,911,983 Tweets

- Pro-Trump: 10,335,126
- Pro-Clinton: 3,576,857

Average number of Tweets per day: 453,732 Tweets

- Pro-Trump: 334,504
- Pro-Clinton: 119,228

Average across two weeks:

- Pro-Trump: 75.4%
- Pro-Clinton: 24.6%

Tweets are initially selected by popular election hashtags, for example #Election2016, #MAGA, #TrumpTrain, #TrumpPence16, #ImWithHer, #VoteHillary, #HillaryKaine etc., and then automatically analysed using a custom Data Science sentiment analysis.

Neutral Tweets (i.e. media Tweets or Tweets that show no clear candidate support) have been stripped out for the purpose of this analysis. When added, SPARCK has analysed 24,937,212 Tweets.