Politics on Twitter: One-Third of Tweets From U.S. Adults Are Political

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Politics on Twitter: One-Third of Tweets From U.S. Adults Are Political

16 Jun 2022

Roughly one-quarter of American adults use Twitter. And when they share their views on the site, quite often they are doing so about politics and political issues. A new Pew Research Center analysis of English-language tweets posted between May 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021, by a representative sample of U.S. adult Twitter users finds that fully one-third (33%) of those tweets are political in nature.Echoing the Center’s findings in its prior studies of tweeting behavior, whether political or otherwise, the vast majority of these political tweets are produced by a minority of users. And certain demographic groups are especially active contributors to the overall volume of political content on Twitter. Most notably, Americans ages 50 and older make up 24% of the U.S. adult Twitter population but produce nearly 80% of all political tweets. And 36% of the tweets produced by the typical (median) U.S. adult Twitter user age 50 or older contain political content, roughly five times the share (7%) for the tweets from the typical 18- to 49-year-old.

Authors

SAM BESTVATER, SONO SHAH, GONZALO RIVER0, AARON SMITH

Published in
United States of America