Group 1 Report

Who are the members of Congress?
by Nora Heaton

We followed tweets by and about 8 members of Congress between October 9 and October 30, 2009. Our members of Congress were: John Boehner, Republican; Joe Wilson, Republican; Harry Reid, Democrat; David Vitter, Republican; Dave Reichert, Republican; Chris Dodd, Democrat; Mike Quigley, Democrat; Arlen Specter, Democrat.

The following table shows findings from our initial profiling:

Most of the members of Congress we followed joined Twitter in 2008 (Wilson, Reid, Reichert, Dodd) or 2009 (Vitter, Quigley, Specter). Only Boehner became a member earlier, in 2007.

From our initial profiling of the members of Congress, they seemed varied in how active they were in Twitter. Follower numbers ranged from 17994 (Boehner) to 586 (Quigley), and numbers of those following ranged from 11118 (Boehner) to 22 (Reid). All members showed steady increases in followers and all had followers abroad, with the exception of Reichert. The member of Congress with the highest number of total status updates since joining Twitter was Dodd with 516 updates, down to Reid with 100 updates. Despite those numbers, Dodd had 0 status updates between October 9 and October 30.

In looking at the Archivist pies for each member, the distribution was very consistent throughout for each. The charts showed peaks in tweets on November 7, 2009 for Dodd, Wilson, Reichert, Boehner, and Quigley. This was most likely a result of the November 7 health care vote in the House.

Some members of Congress, like Joe Wilson, were active in their own statuses and were tagged in many citizen messages. Wilson had 72 statuses in our time frame and 744 citizen messages.

Arlen Specter was the second most active member of Congress. He updated his status 42 times and received 1279 citizen messages.

Other members of Congress, though active, had fewer citizen messages. Mike Quigley had 39 status updates and 109 citizen messages. He was the most active tweeter relative to the number of tweets which tagged him (39/109=35%).

David Vitter fell somewhat in the middle ground categorically. He had 23 status updates and 336 citizen messages.

Chris Dodd was the least active member, with 0 statuses in our time frame, and only 48 citizen messages tagging him.

Dave Reichert, with 15 statuses and 119 citizen messages, was less active in terms of raw numbers. However, he was active in status updates compared to tagged tweets. His responses made up 13% of messages about him, which was high compared to most of the other Congressmen.

How are members of Congress using Twitter?
by Will Gries

For the Twitter Congress project, our group followed eight Congressmen: Chris Dodd (D, Senator, CT), Joe Wilson (R, Rep., SC), Dave Reichert (R, Rep. WA), David Vitter (R, Senator, LA), John Boehner (R, Rep., OH), Mike Quigley (D, Rep., IL), Arlen Specter (D, Senator, PA), and Harry Reid (D, Senator, NV). Each Congressman has his own tweeting habits, except for Chris Dodd who didn’t tweet at all during the time period we monitored, but there are certain generalizations that can be made from our collected data.

The ‘criticism’ category had by far the fewest tweets at eight and only two tweeters, Joe Wilson and David Vitter, criticized others in their tweets. Both Congressmen are Republican, and interestingly, all except for one of the tweets was about the ongoing health care debate. It is also worth noting that Joe Wilson had two of the eight tweets, and David Vitter had the remaining six tweets. This tweet from Joe Wilson is a good example of all eight tweets: “The announcement of the Pelosi Health Care Takeover bill was one of the darkest days I've ever seen in Congress http://bit.ly/3zeCdm”.

The ‘interaction’ category had a little more action at a total of nineteen tweets. Almost all of the tweets in this category are either direct responses to a follower or a retweet of another users update. Joe Wilson’s only tweet in this category deviates from this pattern by offering users a link to communicate their thoughts on America’s future with him. Joe Wilson, Dave Reichert, and Arlen Specter each had one tweet in this category; Mike Quigley had seven, and John Boehner had ten. This retweet from John Boehner shows how tweets in this category were primarily used: “RT @KeepAmericaSafe: Boehner to Obama: 'No more excuses' for delay on Afghan troop surge http://bit.ly/4iXQDy”.

The ‘join-me’ category had one few tweets than the previous category (eighteen tweets). Tweets in this category appear to be used two ways: they are used to direct people to an actual event or they are used as an appeal to followers to join the cause. Only four Congressmen had tweets in this category: Joe Wilson, Dave Reichert, and David Vitter tied at four messages a piece and Arlen Specter tweeted the remaining seven. In this tweet Joe Wilson made an average appeal to his supporters to join his cause: “[*] Help Joe stand for truth by becoming a volunteer today: http://bit.ly/33Yqt1”.

At thirty tweets, the ‘local’ category might appear to be one of the more popular tweet types for Congressman, but like the other categories this type was dominated by just two Congressman: Joe Wilson at twelve, and Arlen Specter at thirteen (Dave Reichert covered the remaining four). All of these tweets had an air of more amusement and humor about them; many referenced local sports teams and a few of those referenced rivalries with other Congressmen about those teams. This tweet is a good example of an ongoing conversation Arlen Specter had with Kirsten Gillibrand of New York: “I look forward to enjoying NY cheesecakes, although nothing will be as sweet as the Phillies' back-to-back titles. http://bit.ly/2TnQA2”

As the name suggests, the ‘other’ category had few tweets that were similar enough to warrant a separate category. The entire category had twenty-eight tweets with Joe Wilson leading the group at twenty-two tweets. Dave Reichert had three, Mike Quigley had two, and Arlen Specter had one.

There were only four ‘party’ tweets, and as like the last category, Joe Wilson had the majority of the tweets at three. Dave Reichert had the final tweet. A great example of a party tweet is this one by Joe Wilson: “‘Pelosi healthcare’: House Republican leaders want their members to call the 1,990-page Democratic health measur... http://bit.ly/3sl13l”

The largest category in our set of tweets is the ‘policy’ category. Tweets were more evenly distributed among Congressmen: Arlen Specter had fifteen, Joe Wilson had thirteen, Harry Reid had seven, David Vitter had six, and John Boehner had five. A majority of these tweets had to do with health care, but a few of them also concerned other topics such as the economy and issues the Congressman personally were involved in. For example, in addition to tweeting on health care, Arlen Specter tweeted about hate crimes legislation he sponsored that passed and was signed by the President. Here is one of Arlen Specter’s tweets about the legislation he sponsored: “I'm delighted the long battle, which began with the '97 Kennedy-Specter Hate Crimes Bill, has finally come to fruition.”

The last two categories, ‘refer-me’ and ‘refer-other’, are used in much the same way by our Congressmen tweeters. Like the ‘policy’ category, these two categories are most frequently used by our Congressmen and represent interests the Congressmen are pursuing in Congress. A good example of this type of tweet is this one by Dave Reichert: “WSJ: Republicans Target AARP's Ties to Health-Insurance Industry http://is.gd/4FR2R”

How do citizens use Twitter to communicate with members of Congress?
by Amed Hassanein and Peter Visser

In analyzing how citizens use twitter, one must consider all the different topics being discussed and how much importance is placed on such topics by the public. To start off my team members and I Used the Archivist to search twitter for any and all messages relating to each of the eight congressmen. The next step was to clean up the data collected and reformate it into excel, which allows for us to have the data in cells and columns that are easily accessed, searched and labeled. After removing all tweets written by congressmen themselves the next step was to break up the constituent’s “Chatter”, into distinct categories that we later used for enumerating data. Each tweet was categorized twice, once for the tone of the message (praise, criticism, insult, ect.) and another for the current issue under which it falls (foreign policy, elections, ect.) The Excel search feature was then utilized to search for the amount of tweets that fell into each category. The results were as follows:

By looking at the tables one might notice a couple of trends and potencial contradictions. To start off only one hundred tweets per senator were categorized within the search results. This was to efficiently gather statistics without sorting through a plethora of tweets. The selection process was as follows, the total amount of tweets per senator was divided by 100 and the resulting number (N) was how many tweets to skip before encoding the next. For example one would only encode every seventh tweet for a senator with 700 total tweets. This brings up the question of why the search results don’t add up to 100 for each senator. The reason is simple, A some tweets met more than one category and so they were counted more than one time, another is that some senators didn’t accumulate 100 tweets and so their results are naturally less than the accumulated sum of 100.

Analyzing the chatter took some time but eventually one could conclude that the public obviously favors some topics to others. For example the uncontested winner with the most search results were the two topics of Health Care and of course Insults. The reader must remember that the citizens are representatives of all demographical levels and as such can be extremely eloquent of speech or rather rude. It is no surprise that Health Care is the most debated topic within the constituents of all congressmen in light of the recent passing of Obama’s bill in the house. In fact most of the tweets regarding this topic was either encouraging the congressmen in question to vote for the bill or threatening to remove him from office if he did. On this note it is worthy to mention that party affiliation seemed irrelevant since both Democrats and Republicans met both opposition to the bill or encouragement. The second very important thing to notice within the results is the amount of re-tweets achieved which had a collective sum of 216. This was a method to reignite interest in a topic after it had died down. It is not an exacerbation to claim that relative to the amount of topics discussed, Re-tweets are the most prevalent. This was also the way that the constituents had conversations that lasted as long as three days judging from the logged time of the first post, and the time the last Re-tweet took place. This is not to say that the constituents were always in agreement about the re posted topic. In some instances a member would re post a topic, only to insult, or heavily critique its contents, as well as its author.

Last but not least, although the members could be vulgar and profane at times, the total amount of insults for all congress members amounted to 140 tweets. While this may seem a very large amount especially compared to the more critical amount of Re-tweets, it seems that total amount of insults is only large due to three members that received the bulk of it while other senators managed only two insults. A deeper analysis about the origins of such insults revealed that they were mostly unrelated to the Senator’s position on vital topics but rather on individual scandals and personality traits. A certain cottage in Ireland cause quite a bit of uproar amongst one congressman’s constituents.

Who is the most personable member of Congress? In what way?
by Will Gries

From our set of Congressman, the most personable member of Congress was Arlen Specter. We chose him as the most personable member out of our set of Congressmen, because unlike our other Congressmen, he frequently interacts with other users on Twitter, primarily constituents or news organizations, and many of his tweets have a very personable tone that the others lack. We believe many, if not all, of his tweets legitimately originate from him and aren’t just a random staffer. This in itself brings a level of personality to his tweets.

Here are a few tweets from Arlen Specter that we believe to be a good example of his overall friendliness on Twitter:

• “I look forward to enjoying NY cheesecakes, although nothing will be as sweet as the Phillies' back-to-back titles. http://bit.ly/2TnQA2”
• “RT @KuhnCNN Just posted: Senators @SenGillibrand to @SenArlenSpecter: 'you're going down!' http://bit.ly/4mtpzZ #Yankees #Phillies @MLB”
• “Thanks for inviting me for a great discussion. RT @DannyDunphy Thank you Senator for speaking with Temple Dems and fellow students today!”

Additionally, Arlen Specter isn’t afraid to get into policy issues with his Twitter account as he demonstrates with these tweets:

• “It's time to repeal DOMA - my op-ed this morning in the Huffington Post. http://bit.ly/3ZNowF”
• “Health insurance firms appear to hike rates in advance of health care reform. http://bit.ly/1JO5oD”

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