#ManyPeopleAreSaying

Submission 22,707

Part of a series on Donald Trump. [View Related Entries]

About

#ManyPeopleAreSaying is a Twitter hashtag mocking Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's frequent use of phrases like "many people are saying" to preface controversial statements and conspiracy theories. In August 2016, the hashtag began trending worldwide after Trump posted a tweet claiming that "many people are saying" Iran executed nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri for being mentioned in Hillary Clinton's emails during her tenure as Secretary of State.

Origin

On June 13th, 2016, The Washington Post^[4] published an article titled "'A lot of people are saying…': How Trump spreads conspiracies and innuendos," which examined Trump's use of the phrases "a lot of people think" and "a lot of people are saying" when presenting controversial opinions. On August 1st, Twitter user @ripple2012^[3] posted a tweet joking that Trump referred to passengers aboard an airplane shot down by Russia as "a bunch of losers" along with the hashtags "#Manypeoplearesaying" and "#DangerousDonald" (shown below).

Spread

On August 8th, 2016, Trump posted a tweet that claiming that "many people are saying" Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri was executed due to "Clinton's hacked emails" (shown below). Within 48 hours, the tweet gathered upwards of 31,700 likes and 12,700 retweets.^[2]

That evening, the hashtag #ManyPeopleAreSaying^[11] began trending worldwide on the social networking platform, with tweets containing various jokes and conspiracy theories about the Republican presidential candidate (shown below).

Meanwhile, American director Rian Johnson tweeted^[1] a photoshopped picture of the Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks as a Sith Lord along with the "#ManyPeopleAreSaying" hashtag (shown below). Within 48 hours, the tweet gained over 2,400 likes and 950 retweets. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the hashtag, including Yahoo News,^[5] SF Gate,^[6] The Huffington Post,^[7] Fusion,^[8] Mashable^[9] and Mediate.^[10]