Congressional twitter use revisited on the platform's 10‐year anniversary

Abstract

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.