Lawmakers Were More Active on Social in the Run-Up to the 2020 Election Than in 2016

Members of Congress were much more active on social media in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in the U.S. than they were in 2016, and their posts and tweets drew much more engagement from users of those platforms, according to a new study from Pew Research Center. Pew found that lawmakers produced 315,818 posts and tweets across Facebook and Twitter from Sept. 3 through Dec. 3, 2020, compared with 207,009 from Sept. 8 through Dec. 8, 2016. And on Twitter, members of Congress received more than 16 times as many favorites and were retweeted nearly seven times as much in 2020 versus 2016. Pew arrived at its conclusions by analyzing every Facebook post and tweet created by every voting member of Congress during the two time periods mentioned above, including official, campaign and personal accounts. Its dataset totaled nearly 166,000 Facebook posts from 1,408 congressional Facebook accounts and more than 357,000 tweets from 1,438 congressional Twitter accounts. Pew said in a statement, “The 2020 election occurred in a vastly different cultural and political climate than the 2016 race. A new Pew Research Center analysis explores the unique ways members of Congress used Facebook and Twitter to engage with the public throughout each election cycle in the months leading up to and after election day, finding that the 2020 election was simply much more online than the preceding presidential cycle.” In addition to the volume of posts and tweets, Pew also drilled into the content, including the distinctive language used by members of each political party. The think tank found that the most distinctive language used by Republicans in 2020 included bless, Israel, defund and liberal, while Democrats focused on equality and representation (equality), voting (make [a] plan [to] vote) and aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic and healthcare in general (Covid case[s], health insurance). Donald Trump was on the minds of Democrats leading up to both elections, as it was the second-most-used term by members of Congress from that party in 2016 and topped the list in 2020, appearing over 33,000 times in the latter period. Meanwhile, the 10 most-used words among Republican lawmakers did not mention the Democratic presidential nominees in either election. Certain terms related to polarizing opposition figures and high-profile political conflicts triggered spikes in likes and shared during each election period. In 2016, Democrats saw the largest increases in audience engagement by mentioning Trump and then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. And in 2020, the same happened for Republicans with posts on wanting to see every “legal vote counted” or referencing Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden. After the news media declared a Biden victory Nov. 7, 2020, election-related posts from Republican members of Congress were most likely to use terms such as recount, fraud and irregularity than they were prior to that date, when the most likely terms included polling location, early voting and (make your) voice heard. In contrast, following the 2016 election, the most distinctive term used by Democrats in related posts was President-elect Trump. Members of both parties were less likely to include links to outside websites in their social media posts in 2020 compared with 2016, but the decline was more pronounced among Republicans. Overall, 30% of posts by members of Congress in 2020 contained links, down from 34% in 2016, and for Republicans, those numbers were 22% and 36%, respectively. And when they did share links, the vast majority went to a small number of popular web domains, with Pew finding that 188 individual domains, or 2% of the over 9,000 shared across the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, accounted for 62% of all the links posted by lawmakers during the last two election cycles. Links from those popular domains shared exclusively by members of one party increased from 20 in 2016 to 31 in 2020.