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 elected officials in the U.S. Focusing on X/Twitter and Facebook, the current database includes 28,834 public officials, their demographic information, and 5,769,904 Tweets along with 450,972 Facebook posts, dating from January 2020 to December 2024. The database integrates three interconnected datasets: metadata on elected officials, weekly aggregated X data, and weekly aggregated Facebook data.
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.
Amid national gridlock on climate policy, state legislatures have become increasingly central to climate governance—yet we know little about how state legislators communicate climate issues online. Drawing on 6,177,988 social media posts from 6,353 legislators on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) between 2020 and 2023, we fine-tune a large language model to classify climate-relevant content and stance. Among nearly 58,000 labeled posts between 2020 and 2021, 34,165 were supportive and 11,573 opposing, with clear variation across platforms.
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.
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.
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.