What's congress doing on twitter?

Abstract

As Twitter becomes a more common means for officials to communicate with their constituents, it becomes more important that we understand how officials use these communication tools. Using data from 380 members of Congress' Twitter activity during the winter of 2012, we find that officials frequently use Twitter to advertise their political positions and to provide information but rarely to request political action from their constituents or to recognize the good work of others. We highlight a number of differences in communication frequency between men and women, Senators and Representatives, Republicans and Democrats. We provide groundwork for future research examining the behavior of public officials online and testing the predictive power of officials' social media behavior.

Strategic communication of EU affairs: an analysis of legislative behaviour on Twitter

“…Legislative studies of this particular social media channel have, so far, largely focused on legislators' Twitter presence and activity around electoral campaigns (for extensive reviews, see Jungherr, 2014Jungherr, , 2016. Early studies found that legislators' party membership, age, gender, and seniority determine who uses Twitter and how often (Jackson & Lilleker, 2011;Lassen & Brown, 2011;Hemphill, Otterbacher, & Shapiro, 2013;Peterson, 2012). More recent research on the members of the European Parliament (MEPs), moreover, shows that voting systems, district magnitude, and seat safety are also important factors (Obholzer & Daniel, 2016;Scherpereel, Wohlgemuth, & Schmelzinger, 2016); presence and activity on Twitter increase with the incentives that these factors create for individual legislators to cultivate a personal vote.…”

“…More recent research on the members of the European Parliament (MEPs), moreover, shows that voting systems, district magnitude, and seat safety are also important factors (Obholzer & Daniel, 2016;Scherpereel, Wohlgemuth, & Schmelzinger, 2016); presence and activity on Twitter increase with the incentives that these factors create for individual legislators to cultivate a personal vote. With regard to the content, Twitter seems to mimic legislative communication practices in both form and substance, where legislators 'broadcast' their typical messages to voters in a way that leaves very little room for interactive communication (Golbeck, Grimes, & Rogers, 2010;Hemphill et al, 2013;Jackson & Lilleker, 2011;Saebø, 2011).…”

Rethinking civic computing in China

“…Hemphill et al examined congressional representatives' Twitter activities (Hemphill et al, 2013). They showed that congress members used Twitter as a broadcast channel rather than an engagement tool.…”

Large-scale cross-media analysis and mining from socially curated contents

“…Meanwhile, surprisingly few studies have been executed dealing with socially curated content. In addition, most of those researches have focused on analyzing social curation services themselves and user activities on those services from socio-information perspectives [1], [6], [11]- [13], [16], [31], [33], [44]- [46]. We believe that those researches would provide the foundation for future developments of cross-media analysis and mining with socially curated content.…”

“…As such, Pinterest is one of the most attracting social curation service for this purpose [12], [16], [31], [33], [44]- [46]. Our study presented in [8] belongs to this line.…”