Dear Nam Tran-Hoang,
Thank you very much for your kind reply. You actually raise an interesting point when you say that I showed that their claim is incorrect. I actually do not even now how I would formally do that.
The point is that I don't know what exactly they did. I might have overlooked a link to their algorithm, but I could not find it. So what did they do? Did they include retweets? Did they only count direct mentions or also indirect ones (i.e. airport Heathrow -> mention of UK)? Did they do this by hand? Did they run a machine learning algorithm? I simply do not know. That makes it difficult to verify what they say for me.
I think that the Wolfram Language is a great tool to make these questions "computational", i.e. reproducible and potentially opens them up to criticism. In that I do there are lots of open questions; someone pointed out to me that Georgia might be a state or a country. If we use indirect mentions we need to decide whether Aberdeen is the one in the UK or one of the US ones, etc.
I am concerned about the state of our discussion culture. As many statements can just be put out there - often they are too hazy to address. I think that a computational language can contribute to a better discussion culture.
My analysis is far from perfect and has lots of bits that can and should be improved. But at least it is open to criticism - and I welcome that.
Thanks a lot for your time to read my post and your reply,
Marco