Who does the New York City Council follow on Twitter?

Jump to the data

New York City is home to the newsrooms of most of our national media and a thriving media environment of its own. We would assume that in any given day in past decades that City Hall would be full of issues of the Times, Daily News, Post, and all the other publications that cover the five boroughs. We would know, by picking up the same newspapers, what information our elected officials were receiving as they thoughts about issues of the day.

In a world of social media, does this still apply? There is considerable debate in America about whether, with the rise of algorithmically-driven social media targeting, voters may now be consuming entirely separate sets of information. But what about legislators? Are they also living in bubbles, do they rely on the same sources of news as everyday civilians, or is their social media feed full of anodyne government updates?

While we can’t fully know what information they get, there is one window into what they see that we are able to analyze.

Twitter’s transparency

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.

We searched for accounts followed by the 51 members of the New York City Council with public twitter accounts - both their official and personal accounts. This gave us a total of 90 accounts This gave us a list of 13,024 accounts that at least one councilmember account followed and 107,272 unique follower-followed relationships. The median councilmember followed 949 accounts, though with a considerable range.

You can access the 1,000 most followed accounts with the button below. See how followed you might be and conduct your own analysis. If you aren’t in the top 1,000 but want to know your own stats, send an email to chris@legislata.com with “NYC Twitter request: (your screenname)” in the subject line and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

To the data

Our findings

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

Councilmembers in NYC love to follow each other. The top twelve accounts were all municipal government or elected officials accounts. This was similar to the Massachusetts State House, where the top 100 accounts were overwhelmingly members of the legislature and unlike the Arizona or Rhode Island State Houses, where reporters led the way.

NYC Councilmember Justin Brannan took the top spot among elected officials, placing second only to the NYC council twitter account itself. (And it’s purely a coincidence that one of our team members lives in his district). The rest of the top were councilmembers, former councilmembers, and the Mayor.

Polarization among news and elected officials

Despite being an overwhelmingly Democratic body, and being focused on municipal issues, polarization is still prevalent. Legislators follow national news accounts and, as we might expect, we see wide differences between the parties.

86% of Republicans follow the New York Post, while only 40% of Democrats do. 43% of Republicans follow Fox News, while only 7% of Democrats do. The majority of all other news outlets such as the NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Vice, Vox, etc. are followed more by Democratic councilmembers.

The most “bipartisan” media accounts (Democratic percentage plus Republican percentage) were Sally Goldenberg at Politico New York, Ben Max at Gotham Gazette, City and State NY and Errol Louis at NY1.

One oddity is that a partisan divide even exists for other government agencies - 86% of Republicans follow NYPDNews as opposed to 51% of Democratic councilmembers, while 51% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans follow NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.

Some of the largest gaps between the parties in terms of who they follow include:

More Republican councilmembers follow: Nicole Malliotakis, Ivanka Trump, Dan Bongino
More Democratic councilmembers follow: Jessica Ramos, NYC Labor Council, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Bridges and tunnels

There are, of course, differences by borough as well. You can see how many of each borough follow each account in the full data set, and we have some notable ones below. We see that media outlets are most followed by Staten Island councilmembers - though that could be indicative of nothing more than the small sample size - and the Yankees and Mets are both followed by the councilmembers from where they play.

Takeaways

The NYC Council is so far the most online of any of the jurisdictions we’ve looked at. Not only is everyone on Twitter, but nearly everyone has an official and personal account. We can imagine that following their accounts, as well as the accounts of the most followed media and civic personalities, can give you a good snapshot of what’s happening in the city. You can also follow our New York City office in Legislata for daily Twitter roundups, information on the legislative activities of the council, and a press release repository. You can request an invite here or send any statements you want shared to statements@legislata.com

How does Legislata help your work?

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 - all in one convenient place. You can join request an invite to our New York City community (screenshot below) that has just launched here.

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