Immediately after a president’s State of the Union address is delivered, news organizations frequently seek to answer a question: How many times did members of Congress stand and applaud? In this era when social media has become an important arena for politics, and in some ways eclipses the statements and interviews representatives and senators issue after an address like the State of the Union, another question may be more important: How many tweets did members of Congress send during the speech?
During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, representatives and senators - or members of their staffs - were busy responding to every word coming out of President Obama’s mouth. Members of Congress sent just under 1,500 tweets during the president’s address. While only drops in the bucket compared with the millions of tweets sent about the address by viewers all over the world, the level of activity illustrates how Mr. Obama’s immediate audience was reacting to what he said in real time.
Seen.coThe number of tweets sent by members of Congress in five-minute increments during the 2014 State of the Union address, starting at 9 p.m. ET. The New York Times worked with Seen, a company that produces social summaries of live events, to collect tweets sent from official House and Senate member accounts starting from around the time Mr. Obama entered the House chamber until just after he finished speaking. The collections of members’ Twitter accounts were taken from the lists maintained by the official Twitter accounts of the House Democrats, House Republicans, Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans.
As would be expected, more tweets were sent by the hundreds of members of the House of Representatives than came from the much smaller number of senators. But perhaps reflecting the Senate’s traditions of decorum, the volume of tweets was skewed well in favor of the House’s members, with only about 120 tweets being written by senators of either party.
And even among representatives, there was a skew toward the Republican majority of the chamber. Over 900 of the total tweets were written by members of the House.
Of course if members of Congress and their staffs couldn’t give their fingers a rest as they listened to President Obama, they weren’t the only branch of government working on overdrive during the speech. The White House Twitter account sent about 150 tweets during the speech from start to finish, to say nothing of all the White House’s related Twitter accounts. Considering the deluge from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the flood from the legislative branch was just one stream of political communication converging with another. And if everyone walked and talked in the capital city of Aaron Sorkin’s TV fantasy, the Washington of 2014 may be a place where everyone is sitting and tweeting.
So what were members of Congress tweeting about? In some cases, they were very forthright in acknowledging that members of their staffs would be writing the tweets:
But in other cases, abbreviation of language created the impression it really was the members tweeting themselves, and not their staffs from another location:
House Republicans tweeted at a high volume starting at approximately 9:20 p.m. Eastern, contesting President Obama’s pledges to enact his economic agenda without Congress’s approval:
And House Democrats began responding approvingly to President Obama in large numbers around the time he discussed equal pay for women:
But when all the political chatter was finished, maybe some members of Congress just wanted to send their constituents a selfie:
