News of the takeover could be shifting the platform’s demographicsWithin hours of the news that Elon Musk, a serial entrepreneur, would add Twitter to his collection, users noticed a peculiar trend: left-leaning accounts were bleeding followers, while right-wing users enjoyed a boom. The Economist studied the pattern by charting the number of followers that America’s members of Congress had on Twitter before and after the deal was announced on April 25th. The results are subtle, yet highly consistent. The average number of followers for all Senate Democrats dropped by around 0.2% between April 25th and April 26th. Accounts linked to Republicans, however, increased by 0.8%. The same was true for the House of Representatives, with Democrats losing and Republicans gaining followers.Vice-President Kamala Harris lost the greatest number of followers, dropping 22,000 in one day. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two progressive senators, shed more than 19,000 and 14,000 followers, respectively. On average, Democratic senators lost 2,700 followers each. A significant drop in Twitter followers across various accounts usually indicates an operation to clean up “bots”—automated accounts controlled by software. But that the vast majority of Republican senators and representatives actually gained significant numbers of followers suggests that was not the…
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Republican senators gained almost 160,000 Twitter followers after Elon Musk's deal | The Economist
