Who does the Massachusetts State Legislature follow on Twitter in 2023?

See the 2,500 most followed accounts by the Mass. State Senate and House of Representatives exclusively on Legislata. You can create a free account and join our Massachusetts community here to access to the data. Your request to join should be approved in a couple of minutes. We recommend requesting access, reading the rest of this post, and then checking out the full data set. You can also see the top 100 accounts here.

When we first started building Legislata, we were researching how information in the political ecosystem circulates when we discovered that nearly every elected official who uses Twitter follows other accounts. There had been research about which politicians have the most followers, but not about who they themselves follow. It tells us how Twitter might be used in that community, what sorts of information our elected representatives are seeing when they log in, and who are the influential voices around them.

We looked at the Massachusetts State House in July 2021 and, with the new legislative sessions underway and new members in the building, decided to see what’s changed since then.

How Beacon Hill follows others

Despite, or perhaps because of, the turmoil at Twitter, there are mixed signals about its use in the Massachusetts State House.

On the one hand, there has been an increase to 188 members (out of the 200 total) with accounts, up from 178 in the previous session. Of those, 132 have tweeted in the past month and 118 in the past week, indicating active usage among a majority of the State House.

On the other hand, there were 59,264 unique accounts that were followed by at least one member and 162,191 unique follower-following relationships in February 2023. This is down from 60,254 and 167,831 from summer 2021. We also see that the median member now follows 681 accounts, down from 740 in 2021. The number of follows for many accounts is lower in 2023 than in 2021 (by about 10 percentage points for the top accounts) - whether because new members haven’t yet followed the same accounts as their predecessors or because of glitches at Twitter is unclear.

So while the future of Twitter in #mapoli is uncertain, it appears there is still enough activity to identify trends.

Who gets followed?

The list of the most followed accounts are primarily other elected officials at the state level, with the exception of the State House News Service at the top spot.

They also show how sticky a Twitter follow can be. Former Speaker DeLeo is still followed by more members than current Speaker Mariano. Charlie Baker’s former Governor’s account is still followed by more than current Governor Maura Healey’s personal/campaign account.

While the relevance of Twitter is an entirely different debate, it does seem as if a personal account that builds up a large following while in office is a valuable asset for a former legislator in their next career. It ensures that their tweets are likely to be seen by an influential audience after they themselves leave office. We see that former Senators Eric Lesser and Adam Hinds, former Rep. Jennifer Benson, and former Chair of Ways & Means (and Legislata Advisory Board Member) Jeffrey Sánchez are all among the 50 most followed accounts, more than many currently serving members of the State House.

Government or news?

In some states, like New York, the most followed on Twitter are members of the media. One New York Assemblymember told me that they follow them because the reporters often know (and tweet out) what’s going on faster than the legislators are told through official channels.

That doesn’t appear to be the case in Massachusetts. While there is a thriving #mapoli community online, the most followed accounts by legislators are elected officials and government agencies. The State House News Service maintains its top spot and Mike Deehan is still the most followed individual reporter, but many other journalists are further down the list, crowded out by the accounts of those they’re covering.

This does not necessarily mean that Twitter doesn’t have its uses for news, of course - certainly not for those outside elected office. It may be simply that legislators feel a greater need to use the platform to hear what their colleagues are saying, and are more used to going directly to the publication or newsletter for their news.

Fast movers

From July 2021 to today, there have been a number of accounts that have found their Beacon Hill followership rapidly increasing. Among accounts that are today in the top 500, the biggest moves have been by those newly elected to the State House, @USAmbIreland (which became of interest when former Rep. Claire Cronin was appointed), Samantha Gross (who started at the Boston Globe in 2022), and Rep. Arciero (for whom we don’t know the reason for the new popularity).

Accounts that have also seen rapid rises over the past 18 months include Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky, Executive Director of Reproductive Equity Now Rebecca Hart Holder, and Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

Explore the data

You can see the 2,500 most followed accounts for yourself on Legislata here. A free account and membership in our Massachusetts community is required (also free).

You can create an account here and request to join Massachusetts here. Requests may take a few minutes to be processed and approved.

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