The State of #ripol in 2023

One of the most common questions in the political ecosystem today is what’s happening with Twitter. Soon, legacy verified users will lose their blue checks (that were originally designed to help avoid impersonation), the company has lost $24 billion in valuation in the last 6 months, and there is talk that it just feels like an emptier place.

We recently looked at this phenomenon in Massachusetts, where we saw a decline in engagement among major elected officials and one-third fewer tweets per day during a busy news week than there had been in 2021 during a slow month.

We now turn our attention to the Ocean State, to see whether the trend continues further south.

Is it being used?

When we looked at Twitter usage for Rhode Island in August 2022, we saw that there were 86 members of the General Assembly with Twitter handles. After the elections, we now are up to 88 members. While it’s an increase from last session, it’s still below the share of elected officials on Twitter in other states and cities like, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, Boston, and NYC.

So there are slightly more accounts than last session, but are they tweeting?

We looked at when accounts posted their last ten tweets, which gives a sense of how often the app is being used. If we see every tweet sent in the last week, then we’ll know that every member is tweeting at least once per day. If we see tweets popping up from last year, we’ll know that many are infrequent.

Although most of the tweets are recent, as we’d expect, we see a lot from earlier this year, and even stretching back to 2014. This tells us what we might have guessed anecdotally. Many members of the State House are active tweets, but many are on the app but don’t really use it.

Are they getting engagement?

While we can’t know the view count on every member of the legislature, and the changing membership makes direct comparison between the whole body difficult for this year to last, we can look at a few high-profile politically-affiliated accounts and see how their likes and retweets have done over the past few months.

What we see here is similar to what we saw in Massachusetts. A drop off in recent months in terms of tweet engagement. This could be because the midterm elections were a relative high point in the political cycle and we’re now into a lower-engagement period. However, it could also be the platform itself. We can see how the Governor’s tweets received much higher average engagement when he moved up from Lt. Governor, but how they have been slowly decline, though with considerable variability. Rep. Magaziner' actually had much higher engagement during the 2020 election than during his own race for Congress. And the Publics Radio shows broadly flat engagement after spikes during the 2020 election.

Who do they follow?

We downloaded the accounts followed by the Rhode Island General Assembly with public twitter accounts and who follow others. The median legislator followed 413 accounts, down from last session’s 458 accounts.

You can access the top 1,000 accounts followed by elected officials members of the state legislature on Legislata. See how followed you might be and draw your own analysis. (And if you’re not in the top 1,000 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). Accessing the data requires a free account and membership in our Rhode Island community, which you’ll automatically be admitted to within a minute of signing up, or you can request access at this link if that does not work.

Similar to last session, most of the most popular accounts were either media outlets or political reporters. They occupy seven of the top ten spots, with the only others going to the official accounts for the House and Senate. However, all of those followings are lower than last session, with the Providence Journal dropping from 91% of the State House’s Twitter users to only 83%. This could be glitches from within Twitter, or that the new members follow it less than the outgoing ones did.

In terms of rankings, most accounts stayed close to their previous ranking, as can be expected when most members are returning from last session. Some of the big movers in the top 50 most followed accounts were Steph Machado, up 13 spots to 28th-most followed, SEIU Rhode Island (up 28 to 30th), Common Cause RI (up 20 to 38th), and Erich Haslehurst (up 17 to 41st).

Blue checks at issue?

The current Twitter controversy is that verified users - those deemed notable enough by Twitter that they received a blue checkmark to show to other users that they were the real person in question - will be losing their checks. This could lead to impersonation or confusion, or they won’t be as visible in the algorithmically-driven For You feed, which could be overwhelmed by the tweets of those paying for the Twitter Blue service.

For Rhode Island, at least, this seems unlikely to matter much. Only 15 accounts were verified (data was collected April 3, when some verified users were removed, but most were still present) while 73 were not.

There does not seem to have been a strict correlation of followers or rank in the legislature to being verified. Sen. President Ruggiero is not verified but Majority Leader Pearson is. The top three most followed are verified, but 4 through 9 are not, and then 10 to 13 are.

Future of #ripol?

It’s hard to say what will happen with political Twitter in the Ocean State. The anecdotal evidence is that engagement with down across a number of metrics, although the turmoil around verification may not matter much in a world where most legislators are already not verified. Either way, if you want to stay on top of bill movement, share press releases, and work more efficiently, Legislata can help fill the gap left by a declining social media landscape. Sign up for a free account or schedule a demo to learn more.