Premium
Congressional twitter use revisited on the platform's 10‐year anniversary
Author(s) -
Golbeck Jennifer,
Auxier Brooke,
Bickford Abigail,
Cabrera Lautaro,
Conte McHugh Meaghan,
Moore Stephani,
Hart Jacquelyn,
Resti Justin,
Rogers Anthony,
Zimmerman Jenna
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24022
Subject(s) - microblogging , social media , subject (documents) , politics , public relations , political science , content analysis , scholarly communication , media studies , internet privacy , sociology , world wide web , computer science , social science , law , publishing
The microblogging platform, Twitter, has been an extremely valuable tool for politicians in sharing information, fostering broader communication to constituents, and promoting their political stances. This article follows up on previous research from 2009 on this subject. We reexamined tweets from the US Congress collected in early 2017. We found Congressional tweeting habits and content have changed very little in the last 8 years. Overall, they tended to use Twitter to pass along political information and links in addition to reporting on official and unofficial activities and meetings. We discuss future spaces for research that go beyond content analysis into issues of motivation, communication, and impact.