Data Analysis: “National Politics on Twitter: A Small Share of U.S. Adults Produce Majority of Tweets”

From Pew Research:

The social media platform Twitter plays a prominent role in how politicians, media outlets and advocacy organizations promote their agendas and engage with political issues. Although these entities represent a highly visible portion of the political Twitter ecosystem, less is known about the political tweeting habits of the 22% of the American public that uses Twitter. A new Pew Research Center analysis sheds light on this question by collecting and analyzing the tweets of a random sample of U.S. adults with public Twitter accounts¹ over a period of one year surrounding the 2018 midterm elections (from June 10, 2018, through June 9, 2019).

The findings of this analysis paint a nuanced picture of just how prevalent political speech is among U.S. adults on Twitter. On one hand, 39% of users with public accounts tweeted at least once about national politics – which includes mentions of national politicians, institutions or groups, as well as civic behaviors such as voting – over the study period. On the other hand, national politics is a relatively small element of the total Twitter conversation among U.S. adults. Content explicitly related to these issues made up just 13% of all tweets analyzed over the year studied.

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