The Half-Dirty Glass of Social Media: New Research on Twitter, Facebook, and the News
One thing liberals and conservatives agree upon
Recently, Edison Research (my company) published the first data from our new syndicated tracking study of social media, The Social Habit. Entitled “Twitter Before and After Trump,” the report took a snapshot of social media usage immediately before January 9th, 2021 (the day after President Trump and approximately 70,000 other accounts were banned from Twitter) and immediately after, to see if there were any short-term changes in usage or behavior associated with Trump’s removal.
Among social media users ages 18+, the percentage who say they currently ever use Twitter went up over 20% in the two-week period after Jan 9th from the two weeks prior, and Twitter’s own data corroborates a story of post-Trump growth. The biggest driver of that shift? Social media users who report being politically liberal flocked back to daily use of the service, as you can see from the graph at the top of this article. Immediately prior to Trump’s ban, 37% of those identifying as politically liberal reported daily Twitter usage, which jumped to 46% immediately after what those liberal users might well have deemed Twitter’s “housecleaning.”
