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US Senatorial Social Media Corpus
Social Media and Posts
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About
This archive contains hundreds of thousands of social media posts made by current and former United States Senators during their terms in office. With over 200,000 recorded tweets, the data product is an essential resource for studying political discourse, legislative activity, and communication trends within the Senate over nearly a decade. The dataset is organised into ten key fields and is tagged under Politics and Science and Technology, making it ideal for academic research, public interest analysis, and technology-focused studies.
Columns
The dataset contains 10 attributes detailing each social media post:
- created_at: The date and time the tweet was published, spanning from 5 September 2008 through 20 October 2017.
- text: The content of the social media post (Tweet). There are 286,959 unique values in this field.
- url: The direct link associated with the post.
- replies: The total count of replies received by the tweet. The mean number of replies is approximately 41.9, and the maximum recorded number of replies is nearly 67,000.
- retweets: The total count of retweets the post received. The mean is 249, and the maximum value exceeds 3.6 million.
- favorites: The number of times the post was marked as a favorite or liked. The mean is 586, and the maximum value is over 2.1 million.
- user: The screen name of the US Senator who posted the tweet. One hundred unique users are represented, with "Sen_JoeManchin" being a highly frequent user.
- bioguide_id: A unique identification code associated with the Senator.
- party: The political affiliation of the Senator. The data shows 51% are Republicans (R) and 47% are Democrats (D).
- state: The US state the Senator represents. Fifty unique states are included, with New Hampshire (NH) and Delaware (DE) being common examples.
Distribution
This product is delivered as the
senators.csv file, with a size of 68.11 MB. It features 10 columns and includes 289,000 valid records. The expected update frequency for this specific archive is noted as never, ensuring a fixed historical snapshot. The usability score is 10.00.Usage
Potential applications include:
- Analysing long-term trends in political communication and public sentiment towards legislative actions.
- Researching the effectiveness of social media engagement for elected officials based on reply and retweet metrics.
- Tracking the evolution of policy debates over time through the content of the posts.
- Studying differences in communication styles between political parties (Democrats and Republicans) and state delegations.
- Exploring patterns in audience engagement by analysing the distribution of replies, retweets, and favorites.
Coverage
The dataset covers posts created between 5 September 2008 and 20 October 2017. Geographically, it encompasses tweets from Senators representing all 50 US states. The data includes posts from 100 unique US Senators, with political affiliations largely categorized as Republican or Democrat.
License
CC0: Public Domain
Who Can Use It
- Political Scientists: To quantify and model political communication strategies and their evolution.
- Data Journalists: To generate stories and visualisations regarding political accountability and online activity.
- Machine Learning Developers: To train models for automated text analysis or topic classification related to government and legislation.
- Researchers in Digital Humanities: To study language use and rhetorical strategies of political figures online.
Dataset Name Suggestions
- Congressional Voices: The Senate Tweet Archive
- US Senator Tweets (2008–2017)
- American Legislative Social Media Data
- US Senatorial Social Media Corpus
Attributes
Original Data Source: US Senatorial Social Media Corpus
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