Tweet acts: how constituents lobby congress via Twitter

Authors:
Libby Hemphill;Andrew J. Roback
Affiliations:
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA;Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
Year:
2014

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Abstract

Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues, citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes.