Who does the Rhode Island General Assembly follow on Twitter?
Twitter is an informational platform as much as it is a social media site. Elon Musk called it the “de facto town square” when he was still interested in buying it.
It’s not just a place for people to tweet and troll. It’s also where many politicians get their message out.
But is that all they do on the app? Or are elected officials also consumers of information, swayed by what they see on their feeds? And whose voices are connected to lawmakers via Twitter?
While we can’t know what any individual sees on their timeline, we can see who elected officials follow on Twitter and, by aggregating across a state legislature, get a sense of how information flows in that state’s political ecosystem.
Diving into the Ocean State
We’ve done this type of analysis for the Massachusetts and Arizona State Houses and Boston elected officials. Now we’re turning our attention to the Rhode Island General Assembly to see who they collectively follow.
We downloaded the accounts followed by the 86 members of the Rhode Island General Assembly with public twitter accounts and who follow others. This gave us a list of 29,552 accounts that at least one representative or senator followed and 70,818 unique follower-followed relationships. The median legislator followed 458 accounts, though with a wide range across the legislature.
We then looked at which accounts were followed across the Senate and House and broke it down between Democrats and Republicans and the chambers.
You can access the top 500 accounts followed by elected officials members of the state legislature. See how followed you might be and draw your own analysis. (And if you’re not in the top 500 accounts, but want your own data, email chris@legislata.com with “Rhode Island Twitter: [Your ScreenName]” in the subject line and we’ll get back to you with it).
Our findings
Not extremely online
Rhode Island is not a Twitter-heavy state, compared to other jurisdictions we’ve looked at. In Massachusetts, 89% of state legislators had accounts. In Arizona, it was 84%. In Rhode Island, 76% of legislators use Twitter.
This certainly raises questions about Musk’s claim of Twitter as a town square – how many town squares wouldn’t have a quarter of a state’s elected officials?
Nonetheless, 76% of legislators is certainly a critical mass. Anyone who follows Rhode Island political Twitter knows that it is a thriving community and plenty of legislators make announcements there. It therefore merits further investigation.
Media-heavy
Most of the most popular accounts were either media outlets or political reporters. In fact, they took eight of the top ten spots, with the only others going to the official accounts for the House and Senate. In fact, 10% of the members with accounts find it more important to follow the Providence Journal than their own institution.
Rhode Island-heavier
It is to be expected that Rhode Island elected officials would primarily follow accounts within their own state, but it stands out just how much politics is about following others in your own real-life geographies.
The most followed figure with an out-of-state origin was Barack Obama, followed by only 57% of the legislature, then Joe Biden, at 52%, and then the New York Times at 42%, and 159th place.
Among accounts followed by at least 40% of the legislature, 98.3% of them are based in or primarily about Rhode Island.
Partisan differences are asymmetrical
While we can’t know how much time each party spends on the app, Democrats follow more accounts than Republicans. The median Democrat follows 540 accounts; the median Republican, only 312.
This could be partly due to the tendency of elected officials to follow members of their own party and there simply being more Democrats in Rhode Island. This can be seen even among statewide officials, who you might expect to be followed for their announcements that would affect all legislators.
Yet Gov. Dan McKee is followed by only 45% of the legislative Republicans on Twitter and Treasurer Seth Magaziner by only 18%. Surprisingly, that’s the same amount of Republicans who follow the RI Democratic Party.
The reverse is true to a lesser extent. Former House Minority Leader Blake Filippi is followed by more Republicans than Democrats, but is still followed by 55% of Dems, more than the share of Republicans who follow the governor.
The biggest differences in partisan following appear to be that Democrats are far less likely to follow non-elected conservative actors or party accounts, like the Young Republicans, and Republicans are less likely to follow elected Democrats, like US Rep. David Cicilline (followed by only 9% of Republican accounts).
Quick hits
Feel free to dive into the data and see what jumps out to you. A few things that we noticed were:
Boston Globe was much less followed than the NY Times (19% vs 42%), despite covering the state. Although, in the Globe’s defense, many of its reporters were among the most followed.
Rhode Island College led among colleges and universities with follows, 27%, then URI at 21%. Providence College 9%, Brown University, 8%, and Bryant College 5%
More Republicans follow FoxNews, at 27%, than the Wall Street Journal (18%), CNN (9%), Washington Post (9%), NY Times (9%), and MSNBC (0%).
For Democrats, national media rankings place the NY Times (47%) at the top, followed by Washington Post (31%), CNN (29%), MSNBC (21%), Wall Street Journal (16%), and Fox News (8%).
The Red Sox and Patriots (13%) were the highest ranked New England professional sports team, followed by the Celtics (9%) and Bruins (5%).
Ted Nesi (88%) is more followed than his employer WPRI12 (74%).
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