Congressional Tweeting Dips Post-Weinergate

There's nothing like a naked photo scandal to frighten legislators off the Internet.

Since the explosion of the Weinergate scandal involving New York Representative Anthony Weiner tweeting out a sexually suggestive photo of himself, there's been an overall decline in congressional tweets, reports The Hill.

Weiner's slipup appears to be the result of having @ replied the intended recipient, thus publicly broadcasting the tweet rather than Direct Messaging her, which would have kept the message private. The error was so simple and the results so catastrophic that they may have caused Congress's tweeters to curb their microblogging habits--at least for the moment.

From May 30 to June 3, lawmakers tweeted about 28 percent less than the week before, according to a study by TweetCongress. The week of the 30th, there were 2,104 tweets from Republicans and 843 from Democrats, compared to the 2,868 from Republicans and 1,182 from Democrats the previous week.

Lawmakers tweeted 50 percent less on Monday, May 30, than the previous Monday, though this drop could also be attributed to the Memorial Day holiday.

And on Monday, May 6, the day of Weiner's confessionary press conference, tweets by Democrats were 30 percent less than two Mondays before. For Republicans, there was an 18 percent drop.

Weiner himself returned to Twitter on June 1 with the message, "Ok, howz about i get back in the game over here.#ScrappyHasBlownPastCrazy."

Comments

[littlebrowngirl]

07:22 PM on 06/11/2011

Old men and technology don't mix.

[GHM]

01:30 PM on 06/11/2011

Who gives a S-H-I-T

[sq1972]

04:21 PM on 06/10/2011

Enough with the "-gate" suffix already! Can we take a stand and make a distinction between true political scandal and sex scandals? Is twittering lewd photos of yourself on par with the committee to reelect the president breaking in and attempting to wiretap the other side's HQ? Hell this isn't even Chappaquiddick--unless one of the unsuspecting women received a tweet of Weiner's junk while driving causing her to lose control of her vehicle and drive off a bridge. At any rate, can we agree to limit the gate suffix to egregious behavior that takes place above the belt and start using "-quiddick" as a suffix for below the belt situations?

[Minimax]

10:43 AM on 06/10/2011

Hang in there.

[RosesForObama]

01:30 AM on 06/10/2011

Well yeah. LOL

[trespanieli]

12:45 AM on 06/10/2011

Oscar Meyer is calling.

[thereisonlyoneparty]

11:53 PM on 06/09/2011

This I do not get.

The issue is not twitter or facebook.  It is using a good boy account instead of a naughty boy account.

Weiner would have been fine if he used his naughty boy account.  But he used the one verified that was utilized for official statements and postings.

[Steve Ballmer]

11:05 PM on 06/09/2011

What a Weiner!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/2011/06/welcome-to-redmond-you-need-weiner.html

[Gatorboy]

10:37 PM on 06/09/2011

That's kinda odd. If they have nothing to hide, why did they stop?

[kinogod]

09:14 PM on 06/09/2011

Lonely lil wiener looks like a contrite Jewish-Italian Gumby in this post-photo!

[lvogt]

08:09 PM on 06/09/2011

They should be using it to throw David Vitter out of office.

[Zeroes]

07:19 PM on 06/09/2011

You would think all gov't workers would of learned a lesson from Palins problems. Everything you say or due on a computer or cell phone can become public knowledge. The social media will continue to weed out psycho's.

[DanBeach]

07:50 PM on 06/09/2011

Most people have known this since the nineties

[GrantRobertson]

05:58 PM on 06/09/2011

This demonstrates just how ignorant these politicians are about technology. It is not as if Weiner's phone just accidentally took those pictures. It is not as if his Twitter account accidentally flirted with all those women. Weiner got in trouble, not because he accidentally hit the wrong button, but because he was behaving in a disreputable manner and accidentally "exposed" that behavior. It is not much different than insulting someone when you think they can't hear, only to find they are on the other side of the curtain.

Here is what I do to avoid having any of my disreputable, insulting, or mean comments leak out to the world: I DON'T MAKE ANY! I only say, online, what I truly want the whole world to hear. I may be controversial. I definitely call 'em like I see 'em. But I don't say anything I wouldn't want everyone to hear.

If politicians are so scared they may "accidentally" slip and leak out some disreputable, mean, or - choose-your-imaginary-entity forbid - the TRUTH, then perhaps what they really need to do is change their behavior. Not just avoid possible sources of leakage.

[thereisonlyoneparty]

11:55 PM on 06/09/2011

And these morons are the one's writing laws.  That is what is scary about this.  They have no concept of how the internet or social networking or any of this stuff works.

This is not as bad as the supreme court justices who did not understand the concept of text messaging, but this is still something that society needs to rectify.

It is not an issue of technology.  It is an issue of understanding it.  Weiner had many options to get his perversions out there without connecting it to his professional accounts.

[Chronicle]

04:35 PM on 06/09/2011

The Republican Speaker of the House has remained silent over the whole Weiner thing. And, I can understand why. One of the first things Weiner said when the scandal broke was what it was like to grow up with a name like "Weiner." Can you imagine what it was like to grow up with a name like "Boehner?"