The Politics of Twitter

For some time now, we've been hearing that conservatives dominate the usage of Twitter when it comes to online politics, and the appearance of TweetProgress, a new aggregator for progressive twitterers, only appears to be reinforcing that notion. For example, today The Hill's story on this topic notes that "many more conservatives use #TCOT than liberals use #p2," citing the leading hashtags employed by conservative and liberals, respectively, on the messaging platform. David All, a leading conservative consultant who has written a popular guide for rightwingers using the site (and a techPresident contributing blogger) was on Twitter today pointing out that there were 3,911 uses of the #TCOT hashtag today alone, compared to just 2,396 of #p2, and "almost all" of the former were "conservative/on-message" while the latter were a "mix of libs/cons/media" posting.

Leaving aside how David managed to sift through and characterize more than 6,000 individual tweets (yes, he's energetic, but that energetic?), I'm not convinced that this is the most salient metric for judging which side is more dominant on Twitter. For one thing, it wouldn't be hard for an intern (or a bot) to simply re-tweet every tweet that appears with #tcot in its text for anyone to artificially inflate the hashtag's usage numbers. David notes that over the course of one week's analysis, he found 5,500 unique users who employed #tcot, which may be a more telling sign of how well the Right is using the platform, but I think this is still oversimplifying the question.

There are at least three other metrics relevant to figuring out the politics of Twitter: the political tilt of its overall user base, the relative standing of hard-core activists (in terms of number of followers), and the impact of various actions that different groups have organized on the site. On the first metric, Twitter clearly tilts to the left; on the second, conservatives are in the lead; and on the third, well, the proof is in the pudding.

Twitter's user base: Fans of pop culture liberals
I spent some time today perusing the top follower lists on "Top Conservatives on Twitter," "TweetProgress" and the politically neutral Twitterholic, and here's what I gleaned about Twitter's users: Not surprisingly, they're most attracted to American entertainment celebrities--but it's a rainbow coalition of social liberals who dominate the top follower lists, with nary a conservative in sight. Just glancing at the top 20 or so on Twitterholic's top 100 list will get you names like Ashton Kutcher, Ellen Degeneres, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, John Mayer, and Al Gore--and they collectively have 14 million followers (not counting duplicates, of course).

Yes, many of these folks are celebrities and most of their tweets are pretty apolitical and self-serving--they're hardly weaving political networks with their use of Twitter. But consider that the biggest rightwing celebrity on Twitter, Newt Gingrich, has less than 900K followers to Ellen's 2.9 million. Clearly, the reason that funny out lesbians with liberal politics are more popular on the site than erudite rightwing ex-House Speakers is because the site's audience is more liberal than conservative.

A more statistical look at Twitter's user demographics also suggests that, on the whole, the site's users probably tilt Democratic. Peter Corbett reports that the site's users are more likely to be female than male (53-47%), under the age of 49 (79%, with most under 34); and well-educated. The Pew Internet Center also reports that Twitter users are more urban than the average internet user, another demographic that tilts Democratic.

Twitter's political activists: the Right is ascendant
Leaving aside the titans of Twitter, politicians and celebrities who mainly use the site to broadcast messages to their fans and followers, and you discover the beating heart of its user base--several tens of thousand individuals who each have at least a couple thousand followers. (I'm ranked 10,375 on Twitterholic based on having just over 4,000 followers, so I'm guessing that if you stretch the power curve out to tally all the people who have at least two thousand might be around maybe forty to fifty thousand.)

Spend some time looking at which political figures (bloggers, activists, politicians) are leading in this "middie" category and you'll discover that, indeed, the Right is ahead. For starters, a number of rightwing activists who were previously fairly obscure (to me at least) have developed quite a following on Twitter via #tcot. Nansen Pihlaja Malin, a member of the Washington state GOP executive board, has 115,605 followers; Duane Patterson, a producer for conservative talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt, has 112,729, for example. I didn't find any comparable upstarts among the users of the #p2 tag.

Then there are the known players, the political bloggers. Here too, the advantage is to the Right. Rightwing firebrand Michelle Malkin has 27,576 followers, compared to DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas's 8,198 (and as a recent adopter of Twitter, Kos has been plugging his usage heartily on his popular blog). James Lileks has 9,298 compared to Josh Marshall's 6,420. Patrick Ruffini is at 8,204 compared to Atrios's 4,903. A lot of liberal bloggers are bunched at the 4000-6000 level, though, and there also seems to be more diversity among this group (with folks like Baratunde Thurston and Liza Sabater closing in on 7,000) than in the political blogosphere's so-called A-list.

What this means, I think, is that conservatives have definitely been looking for and finding each other on Twitter with more intensity than liberals and progressives. Considering the moment they're living in, this isn't surprising. The #tcot hashtag was launched just weeks after Barack Obama won the presidency and Democrats swept Congress. Like the liberal netroots nearly a decade ago, grassroots Republicans and conservatives are adrift and searching for leadership. Thus even if Twitter's overall user base tilts left, those users probably don't feel the same sense of urgency, of needing to organize, that the right currently feels. Hence the appearance of conservative "dominance" of the platform.

But who is using Twitter to greatest effect?
The real acid test, though, is not numbers of followers or users, but impact. And honestly, it's hard to say which side--conservatives or liberals--has made the most of their differing advantages on Twitter. How do you compare the impact of one tweet from Ashton Kutcher (3.3 million followers) plugging President Obama's "Health Insurance Reality Check" site against conservatives popularizing the #handsoff tag to highlight their opposition to health care reform? What if one incredibly funny tweet from Baratunde Thurston sticks in your mind more than ten earnest but banal ones from, say, John Legend, who has more than 140 times as many followers--who is more influential? What's more valuable, traffic or participation?

Trying to answer these questions is a fool's errand, because obviously there are all kinds of valuable tactics and practices one can deploy using interactive communications, and no activist or political group is using Twitter in a vacuum, without a whole panoply of tools ranging from email to blogs to old-fashioned press lists. That said, it may still be possible to tease out what is uniquely powerful about Twitter--its combination of immediacy and connectedness--to start to track who is using it best.

Unlike other political web tools, like email lists, websites and video channels, Twitter is completely instantaneous and multidirectional. A fact or an idea can start almost anywhere on Twitter and spread without centralized control. To be sure, if you're trying to start and spread a meme using the platform, it doesn't hurt to have a network of well-connected friends--but the most popular memes seem to spread mainly because they're fresh AND of inherent interest to users.

So, for my two cents, the most powerful use of Twitter comes during live news events, when attitudes are fluid, lots of people are paying attention and everyone is trying to figure out what is going on. Moments like the presidential debates and those nights when millions of Americans were watching election returns, or President Obama's televised press conferences. It's at these times that the world live web is most lit up, and popularity and influence on Twitter can--if combined with the right 140 characters--make and shape opinions. Who is best at that game? Now that both right and left are mobilizing heavily on the site, we should soon have some real-time tests to answer that question.