Pew Research Center Shares 5 Key Facts About Political Tweets

Pew Research Center mined data from its survey of 2,548 U.S. adult Twitter users in May 2021 about their experiences on the social network, as well as how they engage with politics outside of Twitter, and it shared five key facts. Computational social scientists Samuel Bestvater and Sono Shah explained in the report’s introduction, “In the months before and after the contentious 2020 election, one-third of tweets from U.S. adults were about politics or political issues, according to a new Pew Research Center report. But what about the content and nature of these posts, such as when they were most prevalent on the site, or the terms that most distinguished political from nonpolitical tweets? Here are five facts about political content on Twitter, based on the center’s analysis of almost 1 million English-language tweets from U.S. adults posted between May 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021.” The majority of political tweets from U.S. adults are retweets: 62% of tweets analyzed by Pew were retweets with no additional text, much higher than the 38% share of retweets for non-political tweets. The typical median political tweet retweeted by Americans tallied 4,312 likes, nearly three times as many as the 1,490 seen by media nonpolitical retweets.In the wake of major events, politics makes up a larger share of what U.S. adults tweet about than normal: Pew noted incidents such as the weeks following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 and the inauguration of President Joe Biden, also in January 2021.The daily volume of political tweeting from U.S. adults fluctuates much more than the daily volume of nonpolitical tweeting: Pew said that on a typical day, its representative sample of 942 adult Twitter users posted roughly twice as many nonpolitical tweets (1,206) as political tweets (565), but the volume of political tweeting varied widely from day to day, with more than 14 times as many political tweets on the busiest days for political tweeting compared with the slowest days. That gap was only three times for nonpolitical tweets.During the year studied, references to former President Donald Trump were more uniquely associated with political content on Twitter than any other term: Mentions of Trump, including variations on his name and Twitter handle, appeared in 28% of political tweets from U.S. adults during the time period studied, and other distinctively political terms included references to the presidency, the 2020 elections, Congress and the Republican and Democratic parties.Political tweets from Republicans and Democrats alike are more likely to mention the opposite party than their own: Pew said one out of every 10 political tweets posted by Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents during the study period mentioned the Republican Party, while 7% of political tweets posted by Republicans and Republican leaners mentioned the Democratic Party. By comparison, both Democrats and Republicans mentioned their own parties in about 4% of their political tweets.

Politics

Pew Research Center Shares 5 Key Facts About Political Tweets

The think tank analyzed nearly 1 million English-language tweets from U.S. adults posted between May 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021

David Cohen

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David Cohen