Chart of Congressional activity on Twitter related to SOPA/PIPA by Drew Conway.
From the post:
As many of you know, this week thousands of people mobilized to protest two laws being considered in Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s Senate version the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Several Internet mainstays, such as Wikipedia, Reddit andy O’Reilly blacked out their sites to protest the bill. For some information on why this legislation is so dangerous check out this excellent video by The Guardian.
The mobilization against SOPA/PIPA also included many grassroots efforts to contact Congress and demand the bill be stopped. Given the attention the bill was getting, I was curious if there was any surge in discussion of the bill by members of Congress on Twitter.
So, I created a visualization that is a cumulative timeline of tweets by members of the U.S. Congress for “SOPA” or “PIPA.” To see if there was any surge, check out the visualization for yourself.
Go see Drew’s post and draw the graph for yourself.
OK, but my question would be, who are they tweeting to? Need to distinguish targets of the tweets from those who actually read the tweets. One possible mechanism would be retweets.
That is who retweeted messages from a particular member of Congress? Would be interesting to map that to say a list of congressional contributors. Different set of identifiers for Twitter versus donation records but same subjects.
But Twitter is just surface traffic and public traffic at that. I assume after the “see my pants” episode last year that most members of Congress are a little more careful with Twitter accounts. Perhaps not.
What I would be interested in seeing is all the incoming/outgoing phone and other hidden traffic. Like Blackberries. Would not care about the content, just the points of contact. A “pen register” I think they used to call them. Not sure what you would call it for cellphone traffic.