Liberals and conservatives share information differently on social media

Abstract

Social media provides citizens with direct access to information shared by politicians. Citizens, in turn, play a critical role in diffusing such content. Do conservative and liberal citizens differ in their decisions about which representatives' social media content to share? We analyze more than 13 million users' sharing of 1,293,753 messages by US members of Congress on Twitter from 2009 to 2019, leveraging estimates of users' political ideology from over 3.5 billion prior retweets. We find that liberals retweeted statements covering a broader range of issues than conservatives. Liberals also shared statements with content rated as relatively more toxic by a standard classifier. Given well-established tendencies toward political homophily among social media users, our results suggest that, compared to conservatives, liberals will be exposed to a more diverse set of issues and more toxic content originating from elected representatives. We conclude with a discussion of several possible explanations for these patterns.