Political expression of academics on Twitter

Abstract

Academics play a vital role in the generation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and narratives. Social media provide new, more direct ways of science communication. Yet, since not all academics engage with social media, the sample that does so may have an outsized influence on shaping public perceptions of academia through the set topics they engage with and their style and tone of communication. We describe patterns in academics’ expression online using an international dataset covering nearly 100,000 scholars linking their Twitter content to academic records. We document large and systematic variation in politically salient academic expression concerning climate action, cultural and economic concepts. We show that US academics often diverge from the US Twitter population at large in topic focus and style, although academics are not necessarily more extreme in their beliefs. Future work should examine potential impacts on public trust and the reasons why academics express themselves politically on social media.