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Tweet acts: how constituents lobby congress via Twitter

Authors:

Libby Hemphill,

Andrew J. RobackAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

Pages 1200 - 1210

https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531735

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

Palacin VMcDonald SAragón PNelimarkka M(2024)Configurations of Digital Participatory BudgetingACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/363514431:2(1-28)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635144
Rottinghaus B(2023)Intensity (and backlash) of opinion on civil rights and presidential responsivenessPresidential Studies Quarterly10.1111/psq.1282053:1(111-119)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12820
Akbar SSharma AMishra DMothilal RNegi HNishal SPanda APal J(2022)Devotees on an Astroturf: Media, Politics, and Outrage in the Suicide of a Popular FilmStarProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534801(453-475)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530190.3534801
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Index Terms

Tweet acts: how constituents lobby congress via Twitter
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

February 2014

1600 pages

ISBN:9781450325400

DOI:10.1145/2531602

General Chairs:
Susan Fussell
Cornell University
,
Wayne Lutters
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
,
Program Chairs:
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research
,
Madhu Reddy
Penn State University

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 15 February 2014

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February 15 - 19, 2014

Maryland, Baltimore, USA

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CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Palacin VMcDonald SAragón PNelimarkka M(2024)Configurations of Digital Participatory BudgetingACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/363514431:2(1-28)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635144
Rottinghaus B(2023)Intensity (and backlash) of opinion on civil rights and presidential responsivenessPresidential Studies Quarterly10.1111/psq.1282053:1(111-119)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12820
Akbar SSharma AMishra DMothilal RNegi HNishal SPanda APal J(2022)Devotees on an Astroturf: Media, Politics, and Outrage in the Suicide of a Popular FilmStarProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534801(453-475)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530190.3534801
Vaghela PK Mothilal RPal J(2021)Birds of a Caste - How Caste Hierarchies Manifest in Retweet Behavior of Indian PoliticiansProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34329114:CSCW3(1-24)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3432911
Wu XMontgomery M(2021)The microblogging discourse of disasters: Twitter and Weibo in action in the aftermath of two major industrial accidentsSocial Semiotics10.1080/10350330.2021.193109733:4(731-749)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1931097
Elliott-Maksymowicz KNikolaev APorpora D(2021)How much can you say in a tweet? An approach to political argumentation on TwitterHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-021-00794-x8:1Online publication date: 14-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00794-x
Misnikov YFilatova OTrutnev D(2021)Empirical Modeling of e-Participation Services as Media EcosystemsSocial Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_6(87-104)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_6
van Vliet LTörnberg PUitermark J(2020)The Twitter parliamentarian database: Analyzing Twitter politics across 26 countriesPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.023707315:9(e0237073)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237073
Panda AGonawela AAcharyya SMishra DMohapatra MChandrasekaran RPal J(2020)NivaDuck - A Scalable Pipeline to Build a Database of Political Twitter Handles for India and the United StatesInternational Conference on Social Media and Society10.1145/3400806.3400830(200-209)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3400806.3400830
Feuston JTaylor APiper A(2020)Conformity of Eating Disorders through Content ModerationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928454:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 29-May-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3392845
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