In a press conference on Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended her use of a private email account during her time as America’s top diplomat.
The likely 2016 presidential candidate maintained that she used a private email address to avoid having to use two mobile devices. Clinton claims to have turned over all work-related emails to the State Department, but she conceded that she deteled some personal messages. “The server contains personal communications from my husband and me and I believe I have met all my responsibilities. The server will remain private. I think the State Department will be able over time to release all the records that was provided,” Clinton said.
While Clinton is the early frontrunner in the still nascent 2016 Democratic primary, online sentiment around her has grown more and more negative since the email story broke, according to Zingal Labs, a firm that analyzes digital conversation across a broad spectrum of social platforms with publicly available data including tweets, public Facebook posts, news stories and blogs.
Her press conference lasted only 20-minutes, but the reverberation on Twitter to Hillary Clinton’s remarks created a firestorm on the social platform as political pundits, former White House press secretaries, politicians from both parties reacted to Clinton’s comments using the hashtags #HillaryPresser and #HillaryEmails. All in all, during those 20-minutes, there were roughly 13,000 twitter mentions about Hillary Clinton, according to Zignal Labs. Zignal data showed during that same time period, 94% of the social media discussion mentioning potential 2016 contenders was about Clinton.
Among the Twitter chatter, several republican verified social media users, like the RNC Chairman himself, began demanding that Clinton #HandOverTheServer.
The public took to Twitter to share their response as well. While many shared negative sentiments, some users expressed frustration that the story has been overblown. See the discussion as it happened in real-time.
Yasmin Aslam
Bridget Todd