More criticisms, less mention of politicians, and rare party violations: A comparison of deleted tweets and publicly available tweets of U.S. legislators

Abstract

Politicians nowadays - especially elected legislators - need their social media accounts to better construct their public image. They deliberately delete or keep their tweets publicly available to maximize their desired public image. The current study first provided a qualitative description of all 116th U.S. federal-level legislators tweeting and deleting time sequences from January 3rd, 2019, to September 30th, 2020. The current study then used logistic regression to analyze a random sample combining the deleted tweets (N = 328) and publicly available tweets (N = 808). Results show that legislators are more likely to maintain a professional but party-oriented public image on social media. The current study also finds that: 1) legislators seldom post tweets related to false information and party-violating information; 2) legislators are more likely to delete tweets that have mentioned private life or other specific politicians; 3) legislators are more likely to keep the criticism tweets publicly available. Besides, Representatives are more likely to delete tweets than Senators. These findings indicate that legislators do deliberately manage a public image, containing a clear party affiliation, a critical and non-private concentration, and a good reputation for reliable information and respecting colleagues.