Editor's note: All eyes are on the U.S. presidential election. Who has actually benefited from Donald Trump's trade policies? Did the U.S. become safer during his term in office? Who is winning on the Twitter battlefield for the White House? Data Speaks dedicates three episodes to these matters. The third episode is on the Trump-Biden war on Twitter.

A Trumpian Twitter storm swept the social media platform after the final presidential debate. On October 23, the U.S. president posted 21 tweets related to his rival, while Democratic candidate Joe Biden counterattacked 13 times, repeating the scenario that followed the first debate.

Twitter, the hottest social platform in the U.S., has become an important battlefield in the 2020 presidential election.

By analyzing the two candidates' tweets mentioning each other from July 24 to October 24, we can identify aspects of their online strategies.

Trump preferred to attack Biden's personality. For example, the word "sleepy" ranks fifth in the list of Trump's Twitter sleights – the president has nicknamed the former vice president "Sleepy Joe."

He typed "left" 53 times and "radical" 39 times to argue that Biden "wants to protect his Radical Left Democrat enablers." With "China" mentioned 56 times, Trump also attempted to tie two of his favorite targets together.

Biden, by contrast, regularly used words such as "America," "Americans," "country" and "nation," and offered specific criticism of Trump's handling of the COVID-19 crisis, regularly including the keywords "COVID-19," "health," "care," "crisis" and "pandemic," and contending that Trump has "failed to protect America."

Trump has a reputation for tweeting more aggressively than Biden, but VADER, a sentiment analysis tool, doesn't suggest a significant difference between the candidates' approaches. The sentiment of Trump's tweets about Biden was only slightly more negative than Biden's about Trump.

So, in the fierce Twitter battle, who is winning?

Biden's tweets were more focused on attacks on Trump. While Trump tweeted almost twice as often about his rival, his number of overall posts was over three times greater.

Trump's 581 tweets about Biden as a proportion of his 3,411 in total was lower than Biden's 299 tweets about Trump of his 1,061 in total. Meanwhile, Biden wrote 256 original tweets about Trump, to Trump's 224 about Biden.

Data also suggests that Trump may have been more influential on Twitter, but Biden has become more popular over the past three months.

Trump's posts related to Biden were spread more widely with 8.47 million retweets, which can indicate agreement or disagreement, whereas Biden's tweets mentioning Trump were retweeted 6.24 million times.

As a result of posting more tweets, Trump's total likes in the period were somewhat higher than Biden's though the average number of likes per tweet the president gained fell slightly from 123,500 in August to 123,300 in October, while Biden's jumped from 75,600 to 161,200 in the same period.

The turning point occurred in the week of October 2-8, in which Trump said he had tested positive for COVID-19. Biden's tweet wishing Trump and his wife a speedy recovery from the disease on October 2 was liked more than 959,000 times, the highest of any post in the period. After that, Biden's advantage narrowed but continued until the final presidential debate.

In recent months, Biden has reduced the gap with Trump on Twitter by updating more original and targeted tweets. If "retweets" means reach and "likes" reflects preference, Biden is beating Trump on the Twitter battlefield despite having fewer followers.

Read more: 

Who were the winners from Trump's trade policies?

Did crime fall during Trump's first term? Official data is inconsistent

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