Elected officials occupy privileged positions in public communication about important topics—roles that extend to the digital world. In the same way that public officials stand to lead constructive online dialogue, they also hold the potential to accelerate the dissemination of low-factual and harmful content. This study aims to explore and explain the sharing of low-factual content by examining nearly 500,000 Facebook posts by U.S. state legislators from 2020 to 2021. We validate a widely used low-factual content detection approach in misinformation studies, and apply the measure to all of the posts we collect.
We introduce the Digitally Accountable Public Representation (DAPR) Database, an innovative archive that systematically tracks and analyzes the online communications of federal, state, and local officials in the U.S. Focusing on X/Twitter and Facebook, the current database includes 28,980 public officials, their demographic information, and 5,769,904 Tweets along with 450,972 Facebook posts, dating from January 2020 to September 2024, offering a rich historical perspective on digital political discourse by elected officials in the states.
Elected officials have privileged roles in public communication. In contrast to national politicians, whose posting content is more likely to be closely scrutinized by a robust ecosystem of nationally focused media outlets, sub-national politicians are more likely to openly disseminate harmful content with limited media scrutiny. In this paper, we analyze the factors that explain the online visibility of over 6.5K unique state legislators in the US and how their visibility might be impacted by posting low-credibility or uncivil content.
The impasse in climate policy at the national level highlights the pivotal role of state-level policies, where state legislatures play a crucial role in making climate-related policies. Despite intense debates on the divisive issue of climate change and clear differences in positions among states, there is little knowledge about legislators’ discussions on climate change and relevant policies. Studying almost half a million Facebook posts from over 5,000 state legislators, we use a large language model to identify over 8,000 posts related to climate change.
Recent work in digital politics has begun to explore the role of race and ethnicity in digital communications. This research, however, has not fully addressed how lawmakers interact with their Asian constituents and the broader minority population. We take up this task by analyzing over 3 million tweets posted by state legislators between 2020 and 2021, focusing on messages targeting Asian ethnic groups. We fine-tuned a large language on classification task by using our labelled data and detected 7,202 anti-racism speech and 2,536 racism speech among 25,102 tweets that target Asian ethnic groups specifically.
We study the roles of elected officials in the dissemination of misinformation on Twitter. This is a particularly salient online population since elected officials serve as primary sources of information for many stakeholders in the public, media, government, and industry. We analyze the content of tweets posted from the accounts of over 3,000 U.S. state lawmakers throughout 2020 and 2021. Specifically, we identify the dissemination of URLs linked to unreliable content.