Report: Dems More Likely To Use Twitter

With around a quarter of all American adults using Twitter, the Pew Research Center wanted to better understand and analyze how these users feel about, engage with, and consume news on the social media platform.

MediaPost reports Pew conducted a survey of 2,548 U.S. adult Twitter users between May 17 and May 31, 2021, which also included a subset of 1,026 respondents who allowed the Center to link their unique Twitter user names directly to their activity on the platform.

The two resulting reports -- The Behaviors and Attitudes of U.S. Adults On Twitter and News On Twitter: Consumed By Most Users and Trusted By Many -- reveal a mix of positive and negative user experiences.

The analysis of general Twitter users offers some key takeaways with regard to behaviors based on privacy, political affiliations, on-platform abuse, and more.

At least 53% of users say they have public profiles visible to anyone, despite reporting private profiles or confusion over privacy settings. However, examination of the users who provided the Center with a unique Twitter handle reveals a much higher number –– 89% –– of profiles set to "public."

In terms of political affiliation, Democrats and Republicans, not surprisingly, report differing views on the site's major issues and overall impact on democracy.

While an almost equal number of users believe the site is mostly good (37%) and mostly bad (38%) for American democracy, Republican users are twice as likely (60%) as Democrats (28%) to say the site has a negative impact.

Republican users are also far more likely (59%) than Democrats (17%) to report that Twitter's limits on reach or visibility of certain posts is a major problem.

The issue of banning users received a similar response, with 61% of Republicans to 6% Democrats citing it as a major problem.

One area that did not show variance between political identification, age, gender, or educational attainment is reports of harassment and misinformation. Seventeen percent of users say they have experienced personal harassment or abuse on Twitter, while 33% say they witness “a lot of inaccurate or misleading information.” Around half of all users believe misinformation (53%) and harassment (47%) are major problems on the site.

An analysis of tweets by the group who provided real Twitter handles found that the top 25% of active tweeters produced 97% of all tweets from American adults between June 12 and September 12, 2021.

While a small share of highly active users are producing the vast majority of content on the platform, the new reports show that high-volume tweeters produce few original tweets and receive little engagement from the broader Twitter audience.

In the June-September survey window, the Center found that from that 97% of tweets from the top quarter of users, only 14% were original posts, while 49% were retweets and 33% were replies to other users.