What’s in a political hashtag? A #mapoli and #bospoli data dive
Before you read, you can test your knowledge with our #mapoli/#bospoli quiz. Participants are entered for a raffle for a $100 Amazon Gift Card. Drawing will be announced Fri Sept 24 at 6pm.
Much of political conversation in 2021 happens on Twitter. It’s how many people receive news, communicate their ideas, and have conversations about the topics of the day. It’s one reason why we’ve researched who elected officials follow, what candidates in a mayoral race say, and even whether their following numbers correlate with their votes.
One of Twitter’s unique features (at least when it first emerged) is the hashtag. From a proposal to use them as metadata after seeing their potential in the San Diego fire of December 2007, they have become as a way of injecting a tweet into a topic. Civic organizations, elected officials, or citizens can all put their ideas into the running conversation in that area.
But what happens in those hashtags?
Who is using them? What is being discussed? Are they for elected officials making statements or regular people discussing the issues of the day?
We don’t know. The volume and ephemerality of tweets makes their study difficult, which is why one of the most relevant academic articles on the topic is more than ten years old and from Canada.
We wanted to find out more, so we scraped all tweets using #mapoli and #bospoli from August 7 to September 1, 2021. It provided us 17,136 tweets for #mapoli and 13,149 for #bospoli, or an average of 659 and 506 per day.
With the caveat that we can only draw conclusions based on that time period, here are some of our findings. Keep reading for more details.
The hashtags are primarily for non-elected officials to talk about the news. Electeds’ tweets are a small fraction of the total.
However, elected officials can get high cumulative engagement when they do use the hashtag.
It’s a workday phenomenon.
Beacon Hill loves 🚨 and City Hall prefers 🤦.
State politics opinions are more likely to come from behind a desk and local from a phone.
The emotional weight of the words are balanced between positive and negative sentiment, with trust and fear among the most frequently evoked.
Power users #mapoli tend to follow national Democrats and power users in #bospoli follow local elected officials.
Who tweets with hashtags?
There were 2,367 accounts who tweeted #mapoli in that time period and 2,819 for #bospoli. However, most tweeted that hashtag only once and half of all total tweets coming from the top 10%. Here are the top ten most frequent tweeters for the hashtags. Interesting, despite the Boston municipal elections, none of the mayoral or city council candidates were in the top ten for either.
Accounts with the most tweets containing the hashtags in the time period analyzed. Non-verified accounts for those not in elected office or media with whom we could not get in touch before publication are redacted.
For engagement, the results are similar. There is an exponential increase in total engagement (which we measure as retweets plus favorites) as you move up the rankings.
We also see that when it comes to engagement, elected officials and candidates enter the top ten (with two mayoral candidates, Michelle Wu and Andrea Campbell in the top fifteen).
This shows that when elected officials tweet, they can get much more engagement than others, but that’s not necessarily true of all. The average elected official tweet is has only marginally higher engagement than the average non-elected tweet.
Moreover, elected officials don’t take up a large percentage of the hashtags. On #mapoli, for example, only 1.5% of all tweets came from members of the Legislature, despite their decisions being drivers of the state political news.
What’s said in the hashtags?
With more than a thousand tweets sent per day, it can be impossible to keep up with every word mentioned. That’s where text mining techniques can come into play.
Counting the most frequent words in the tweets show us that in this time period, #bospoli was talking about the mayoral race, while #mapoli included much more discussion of the Governor and COVID-19. Within the wordclouds below are other common words for each (larger words indicate more frequent usage).
Using sentiment analysis and the NRC emotion corpus (footnote 1), we can see that the words used in the tweets were roughly evenly split positive and negative (with #bospoli slightly more positive). The words are also most commonly associated with trust, fear, and anger.
This makes sense from a political point of view: you want to balance the hope (associated with trust) that your policies will improve the world, while pointing out the problems (a fear word) and disasters (an anger word) that you are running against.
We’ll set this as a benchmark for political conversations, and in future pieces see which states are more or less hopeful, angry, or fearful than Massachusetts.
Who do the power users follow?
Since people are influenced by - or retweet - what they see in their feeds, it’s useful to know what is contributing to those who shape the hashtags.
We looked at who the top 10% of users by total engagement in #mapoli and #bospoli follow on Twitter. We found that the accounts most followed by this group of users are mostly political, with more than half being accounts for politicians or parties, and most others being non-governmental organizations active in politics, journalists or news outlets, and private citizens engaged in political discussions.
These politicians are almost all Democrats, even those who do not represent Massachusetts. More #mapoli power users follow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib than Governor Charlie Baker.
#bospoli users tend to stay close to Boston. The top followed accounts are elected officials who represent Boston or news outlets focused on the city. AOC, for example, is the most followed for #mapoli but drops to 25 for #bospoli.
You can see the top 100 for each here.
When are the hashtags used?
Political conversations take place during the work day, with Wednesday mornings being the peak tweeting times.
Since people are much more likely to be reading Twitter while posting, this might be something that candidates and advocacy groups want to keep in mind when scheduling their posts.
What emojis are used the most?
Here are the top emojis used in the hashtags. #mapoli likes to break news and #bospoli is exasperated.
What are people tweeting from?
The majority of tweets come from mobile devices, though there is a small but significant difference between the hashtags.
61% of #bospoli tweets come from iPhones or Android devices, compared to 55% for #mapoli. Whether this reflects that people are more likely to comment on local politics on the go, or whether state politics occupies more brain space while people is unknown. As more state political hashtags are investigated, we’ll see if this pattern repeats.
So what does this all mean?
As is a common refrain in political circle, Twitter is not real life. However, it is a part of real life. Hashtags - just as they did when they first emerged in 2007 - let people add their opinion to a common topic. For state and local politics, the feeds of these hashtags allow a constant conversation of anyone who wants to contribute.
We find that these tweets are not simply press releases by elected officials. Indeed, incumbents are a tiny fraction of all tweets. But nor are they perfectly representative of the population. Twitter can be a powerful tool for keeping up with the news and hearing voices that may not have any other platform. But it should be used like any tool - with an awareness of its limitations.
How does Legislata help?
Legislata is productivity software for people working in politics. Want to spend more time diving into the news coming across a hashtag feed and finding what issues are bubbling under the surface? Legislata can help you get through your inbox and manage your tasks so you and your team can focus more on the ideas and conversations that matter to you.
1 Saif M. Mohammad and Peter Turney. (2013), “Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon.” Computational Intelligence, 29(3): 436-465.
Answers to the quiz
Here are the answers to the #mapoli/#bospoli quiz.
Email entry
501-1000
659
501-1000
Wednesday
iPhone
#bospoli
Before noon
Someone else
Journalist’s or media personality’s account
@masenate
@LydiaMEdwards
@AOC
@ewarren
Tie: @nytimes and @BostonGlobe
@AOC
@AyannaPressley
@universalhub
school
mayor
Siren
Facepalm