WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump wasn’t the only one tweeting up a storm the last couple of years.
Members of the 116th Congress spanning the final two years of the now-tweeter-non-grata’s presidency set records for the sheer volume of posts to Facebook and Twitter, a study from the Pew Research Center has found. Lawmakers with large followings didn’t even have to crank out that much content to garner a massive share of engagement.
The 30 members who had at least 1 million social media followers — triple the number in the 114th Congress — generated only about 10% of member content. But they held 70% percent of the followers, 71% of the reactions and favorites, and 65% of the shares and retweets, the Pew study found.
Members of the 116th collectively generated more than 2 billion reactions like replies and comments on the two sprawling social media giants’ platforms from users, the study said. It’s a massive jump from the 114th Congress, when their posts only garnered 356 million reactions.
Pew collected more than 1.7 million Facebook posts from the 1,438 accounts of 714 different members and wrangled 3.8 million tweets from the 1,470 accounts that belonged to 717 different members of Congress for its analysis from Jan. 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2020, spanning essentially three congresses, the 114th, 115th and 116th.
The 30 members of the “million-follower club” included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. The lawmakers are known for wielding their social media accounts to engage with voters — and sometimes spar with each other.
Members of the 116th thumbed out an unprecedented number of tweets, posting twice as many times on the platform as on Facebook, according to Pew. But overall posting has been consistently rising on both platforms since January of 2015, when Pew began collecting data.
There has also been a major uptick in user interest on what lawmakers are saying on the platforms — the overall number of users who follow lawmakers has tripled since January of 2015.
Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ combined 21.70 million followers (both Twitter and Facebook) was the most for a member in the 116th. Then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., had the second-most at 16.85 million combined.
Ocasio-Cortez’s 12.72 million combined followers landed her in third and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, made fourth with 12.04 combined followers.
Pew found five first-term members of the 116th had more than 1 million followers, a departure from the 114th when no newcomers were on it. It’s a possible indication of the role that social media presence may now have in successful campaigns.
The analysis included posts between Jan. 1, 2015, and Dec. 31, 2020. The posts they used to conduct their analysis were ones that included text from posts, captions from images and even emojis. It excluded posts of photos or videos that did not include meaningful text.
Though posting to social media continues growing among lawmakers, that fervor hasn’t extended to passing bills.
The 116th Congress was one of the “least legislatively productive Congresses of the past five decades,” another Pew study found. “Of the 24 Congresses we analyzed, only four passed fewer laws than the 116th — three of them within the past decade.”
