Elected officials occupy privileged positions in public communication about important topics—roles that extend to the digital world. In the same way that public officials stand to lead constructive online dialogue, they also hold the potential to accelerate the dissemination of low-factual and harmful content. This study aims to explore and explain the sharing of low-factual content by examining nearly 500,000 Facebook posts by U.S. state legislators from 2020 to 2021. We validate a widely used low-factual content detection approach in misinformation studies, and apply the measure to all of the posts we collect.
We introduce the Digitally Accountable Public Representation (DAPR) Database, an innovative archive that systematically tracks and analyzes the online communications of federal, state, and local elected officials in the U.S. Focusing on X/Twitter and Facebook, the current database includes 28,834 public officials, their demographic information, and 5,769,904 Tweets along with 450,972 Facebook posts, dating from January 2020 to December 2024. The database integrates three interconnected datasets: metadata on elected officials, weekly aggregated X data, and weekly aggregated Facebook data.
Elected officials increasingly communicate across multiple social media platforms. We argue that platforms are not neutral channels: the same political pressures can be expressed differently across them. Using 6.19 million Facebook and X posts from 6,356 U.S. state legislators, we examine climate attention and stance. Ideology structures climate communication differently across platforms: in 2020–2021, liberal legislators devote substantially more climate attention on X, whereas ideological differences in climate stance are stronger on Facebook.
Elected officials have privileged roles in public communication. In contrast to national politicians, whose posting content is more likely to be closely scrutinized by a robust ecosystem of nationally focused media outlets, sub-national politicians are more likely to openly disseminate harmful content with limited media scrutiny. In this paper, we analyze the factors that explain the online visibility of over 6.5K unique state legislators in the US and how their visibility might be impacted by posting low-credibility or uncivil content.
We study the roles of elected officials in the dissemination of misinformation on Twitter. This is a particularly salient online population since elected officials serve as primary sources of information for many stakeholders in the public, media, government, and industry. We analyze the content of tweets posted from the accounts of over 3,000 U.S. state lawmakers throughout 2020 and 2021. Specifically, we identify the dissemination of URLs linked to unreliable content.