Some terribly unfortunate students at the University of Michigan had to spend a semester scratching their eyes out in front of a screen, counting the millions of times Tea Party people have taken creative license with the English language and coughed up a mauled, dismembered sentence in 140 characters or less. You will probably not be surprised to learn that these are the people who do the most blabbing on Twitter, compared with Republicans and Democrats.
That's the finding of a study out of the University of Michigan, which surveyed 460,000 tweets over a three-year period from 687 candidates running for U.S. House, Senate and governor.[Politico]Over the study period, tea party candidates tweeted an average of 901 times compared to 723 times for Republicans and 551 for Democrats.
"The conservative candidates---Republicans and Tea Party members---definitely used Twitter more visibly and showed a more coherent set of messages and topics," said Eytan Adar, assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "They also followed each other much more closely. I think it's fair to say they were much more cohesive in a lot of ways and at the end of the day that makes for a stronger campaign."
