Twitter Research: Congress and Climate Change

From Northeastern: Researchers mine Twitter to reveal Congress’ ideological divide on climate change. “In a new paper pub­lished Monday in the journal Cli­mate Change Responses, [Brian] Hel­muth and his North­eastern col­leagues ana­lyzed the Twitter accounts of U.S. sen­a­tors to see which leg­is­la­tors fol­lowed research-​​oriented sci­ence orga­ni­za­tions, including those cov­ering global warming. Democ­rats, they found, were three times more likely than Repub­li­cans to follow them, leading the researchers to note that ‘overt interest in sci­ence may now pri­marily be a “Demo­crat” value.’ Yet out of that polit­ical polar­iza­tion, says Hel­muth, came a ray of hope: 15 Senate Repub­li­cans bridged the aisle, dis­playing a draw to sci­ence and thus a way to bring sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion to those not receiving it on their own.”