In today's society, social media has become an important source of communication. As young college students, we use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media applications every day on our phones or laptops. However, we may not think about the fact that 50+ year old congressmen and women are also using these same social media applications, and the fact is that some of them may use it more than young people do. Many of the people in Congress have learned to adapt to the ways of social media, and a large number of them use it to express their viewpoints on issues in the government. Some of them may use it more than others for particular reasons. They have also learned that social media is a good tactic when it comes to acquiring voters for elections. While gathering data for my Congress and Social Media Project the percentages given by the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) program have made it clear that there is a difference in the usage of social media across members of congress (MCs). Using the data we gathered for the Congress and Social Media Project, I will look at whether there are differences in the way white and minority congressional members use social media.
During this project students followed the tweets and posts of 110 members of Congress. Out of these members, only ten of them were African Americans and only seven were of other minorities (Latina American/Asian). Out of 2,515 total post/tweets, 87.7% came from white MCs, 6.6% came from African American MCs, and 5.7% came from other minority MCs. Out of all of our members of Congress in our project 84% were whites, 9% were African Americans, and 7% were other minorities. From a first glance, it could be said that the reason why white MCs use social media more is because there is a larger number of them. Essentially this is true, but within the crosstabs and data it can be shown that depending on the matter at hand this is not always true.
