The median Democratic member of Congress now has over 17,000 more Twitter followers than the median Republican.īy contrast, members of both parties have seen their Facebook audiences grow at a similar rate, and the typical Republican and Democrat now have about 10,000 more Facebook followers than did their counterparts in the 114th Congress in 2016. The follower counts of both parties have greatly increased since then, but on Twitter the number of followers for the typical Democrat has increased much more rapidly than for the typical Republican. adults on Twitter are more likely to identify as Democrats, Democratic members of Congress have incorporated Twitter into their communications to a much greater extent than Republican members, as their volume of posts and number of followers suggests.Īs recently as 2016, the typical Democrat and the typical Republican had roughly comparable numbers of followers on both Twitter and Facebook. But these overall figures obscure notable differences in the ways that members of each party use these platforms. The median Democratic member posts more and has more followers than the median Republican on Twitter partisan differences on Facebook are more modestĪcross their accounts, the median member of Congress currently has 36,878 followers on Twitter and 27,605 followers on Facebook, each of which has increased substantially since 2016. On average, these posts also received substantially more audience engagement, whether measured by reactions and favorites or by shares and retweets. Comparing the first five months of 2020 to a similar period in 2016, the median member of Congress created 16 more Facebook posts (an increase of 48%) and 48 more tweets (an 81% increase) per month. Individually, members of Congress now post more content to Facebook and Twitter than was true four years ago. In the first five months of 2020, members of Congress have collectively produced an average of 73,924 tweets and 33,493 Facebook posts each month, generating a total of over 476 million reactions and favorites and over 112 million shares and retweets in the year to date. 1 In total, these members produce an enormous volume of social media content. Social media is near-ubiquitous among members of Congress, and the typical (median) member maintains two accounts on each platform (usually one official account and one personal or campaign account). This analysis focuses on elected members of Congress since 2015, but all of the data preparation and cleaning procedures described in this methodology were conducted across the entire database where applicable, with the intention of developing generalizable procedures that can be applied in the future to new or expanded data. politicians, including members of Congress, governors, state officials, and many of their primary and general election challengers. As of July 7, 2020, the database includes 2,965 Facebook accounts and 2,006 Twitter accounts maintained by 4,655 different U.S. To support this effort, researchers have spent hundreds of hours collecting, cleaning and validating this data. In 2015, Pew Research Center launched an initiative to study political rhetoric on a large scale by building an ever-expanding database of political social media activity across multiple platforms, starting with Facebook and now including Twitter. A living database of political communication
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |