Congressional Clickbait: How Position Taking Drives Online Engagement

• In Event: One Vision: Elite Communication Across Platforms

Abstract

The average U.S. member of Congress has over 100,000 followers on Twitter and nearly as many on Facebook, but there is limited descriptive evidence when it comes to what they actually say or how their online audiences react. We assemble a comprehensive list of all official, campaign, and personal congressional accounts and collect all public posts on both Twitter and Facebook from Jan. 2015 - Jan. 2020. We then use neural net-based supervised text classification models to measure the positions that legislators have taken on social media across millions of posts for dozens of policy issues, giving us a dynamic measure of Congress' rhetorical agenda. We identify partisan differences within this agenda and examine how legislator- and district-level characteristics relate to position taking. Finally, we examine how rhetoric drives engagement and show that for many lawmakers, policy-specific position taking earns more engagement on Twitter than on Facebook, though there are substantial party and platform differences in the popularity of specific positions.

Authors

• Patrick van Kessel, Pew Research Center

• Regina L Widjaya, Pew Research Center

• Adam G. Hughes, Pew Research Center

• Sono Shah, Pew Research Center