Republicans More Influential on Twitter than Democrats [Study]

Republicans swooped in for a victory in the House of Congress earlier this month in the US mid-term elections, but that’s not all they won: they also won the “election” on Twitter. A new study from Hewlett-Packard (HP) measures the influence of House Republicans and Democrats on Twitter, and finds that Republicans are far-and-above the winners.

HP developed an innovative measurement of Twitter influence, which was created by rigorously analyzing 22 million tweets. Researchers used both “influence” and “passivity” as factors, and determined that in order to become influential, a Twitter user must be able to break past their followers’ natural inclination to be passive.