Who does the New York State Legislature follow on Twitter?

We recently looked at who New York City councilmembers follow on Twitter, to get a sense of whose voices NYC’s local elected officials are most likely to see when they open the app. Today, we’re going to head up the Hudson to Albany to do the same for members of the State Legislature. You can also read more about this project in the Sept 5, 2022, issue of City and State NY.

Twitter is one of the most popular platforms for political professionals to get their news. Users receive most of this content from the accounts that they follow and - luckily for our purposes - the accounts they follow are public. There are a total of 194 members of the Assembly and Senate who have twitter accounts and follow others. There are 83,137 accounts that at least one legislator’s account followed and 205,713 unique follower-followed relationships. The median legislator followed 680 accounts. This gives us a picture of those accounts that legislators, or their staffs, looked at, thought they were for one reason or another worthy of keeping up with, and clicked “follow.”

We have looked through the data and come to some preliminary conclusions. If you want to conduct your own analysis or see how followed you might be, you can access the 2,000 most followed accounts with the button below. If you aren’t in the top 2,000 but want to know your own stats, send an email to chris@legislata.com with “NY Twitter request: (your screenname)” in the subject line and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Our findings

Back from checking out the data yourself? Okay, let’s dive into what we found.

Albany is very online. Almost everyone - 96% of the State Legislature - has a Twitter account. It’s not as much as New York City Council, where every member had at least one account and where most had both official and personal accounts, but much more than Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Arizona where we’ve also run similar analysis. Whether that’s because New Yorkers are more tech savvy, a larger state which encourages more communication efforts, or idiosyncratically keen to tweet is unknown. There are some divides that exist within the legislature. A larger percentage of Senators having accounts than Assemblymembers. A similar divide extends to Democrats and Republicans, the former having a higher percentage even if only by a few percentage points. 

Media-led

The NY State Legislature, like Rhode Island and unlike the NYC Council, is most likely to follow political reports and other media outlets. The top 10 includes 6 media accounts and the top 100 has 36 accounts that are in media or are former journalists.

However, that understates their popularity. If you score each account in the top 100 by their position, ie, 100 points for first, 99 points for second, etc, media accounts are the most followed type, overtaking the state elected accounts that comprise almost half of the top 100. While we can’t know if this means that elected officials use Twitter to get news, it is suggestive that they might - or at least that the news from these accounts pop up on their feed when they open the app. Since the list is dominated by those focused on covering Albany, rather than national reporters or other media personalities, it indicates that elected officials use Twitter to find out what’s happening in their legislature, rather than simply politics in general.

Polarization apparent

One of the themes of this research in other jurisdictions has been how polarization is apparent in who is followed on Twitter. New York is no exception. There are some clear differences in who is followed that would be expected from partisan divides. For example, @NewYorkGOP is followed by 81% of Republicans but only 6% of Democrats and @NYSenDems are followed by 70% of Democrats but only 17% of Republicans.

However, there are other gaps that would not be expected simply from institutional affiliation. Attorney General Tish James is followed by only 13% of Republicans but 67% of Democrats. While she is a Democrat herself, we might expect more Republicans to follow a statewide official. In fact, only 28% of Republicans follow the official Attorney General account (compared to 74% of Democrats), so it’s not simply an issue of keeping up with campaign news.

We can also see differences in the news outlets followed.

• More Republican: NY Post (62% of Republicans / 30% of Democrats); Fox News (49% of Republicans / 10% of Democrats); Newsmax (19% R / 0% D); OANN (11% / 0%)

• More Democratic: NY Times (61% of Democrats / 32% of Republicans); CNN (36% D / 23% R); Washington Post (32% D / 21% R); MSNBC (17% D / 2% R).

There were partisan differences for some outlets focused on Albany, but these operated at a much higher baseline. For example, while Capital Tonight had a 12 percentage point difference (79% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats), that still represented more from both parties than the number of Republicans who followed Fox News or Democrats who follow the New York Times.

Not quite a network

New York has the largest Twitter presence among the states we’ve looked at so far. However, it doesn’t seem that they are too keen on following each other to keep up with the news of other elected officials. The average Democrat is followed by only 37% of their fellow Democrats and Republicans by less than half of their fellow GOP lawmakers. They’re even less likely to follow members of the opposing party. What does this say about the scope of communication among the legislature that members are not taking the simple step of following each other to keep tabs on what their colleagues / partners / rivals are saying?

This was a surprise when we saw those low numbers. Social media is designed to let you keep up with what’s happening with people in your network. Twitter may be less committed to this model than the original Facebook or Instagram were - since retweets and likes meant that you might see tweets from people you weren’t following - but the algorithm presumably puts a heavy emphasis on followed accounts when displaying your feed.

Whether that means that members of the State Legislature are less informed about their peers’ positions than if they followed them on Twitter is unclear. They may all be keeping up with press releases, have text threads, or be in communication some way else. But it certainly means that they’re either not taking advantage of how technology can make information sharing simple or they don’t find Twitter to be the most convenient platform for that. It could be that they find their feeds are full of others’ tweets rather than their peers, so they don’t think to follow them there, or that the nature of political communication of 200 word or more statements doesn’t lend itself to 280 character or less tweets. We’ve all seen the typical screenshot of a statement tweet and had to zoom in to make out what it’s saying.

Luckily, Legislata is building features to address this.

Legislata helps you stay on top of the information that underpins your political world. Manage your own information, stay alerted with what’s happening in your networks, and get your message out - no JPGs of PDFs required. You can join request an invite to our New York community that has just launched here.

With LegislataPRO, you can also turn your inbox into a hub of productivity (and is an ideal solution for elected officials inundated by constituent communications). Sign up for a free account or schedule a demo to learn more.