In the wake of Rep. Anthony Weiner's continuing death spiral due to his online sexual escapades, TweetCongress has taken a look at the scandal's effect on the vehicle that hastened his demise, Twitter, and found that his colleagues in Congress decreased their tweeting post-Weinergate.
In the week following the breaking news, beginning May 30, TweetCongress, which engages members of Congress on Twitter, crunched the Twitter activity of both Republicans and Democrats and found both parties' reps slightly muted in their usual tweeting, down almost 30 percent for both.
In this nice infographic created by Matthew Warlick of IdeaLoop, you can see that Republicans dove from 2,868 tweets the week before Weiner's scandal broke (May 28) to 2,104, a decrease of 27 percent. On Weiner's party side, tweets declined from 1,182 to 843, a slip of 29 percent. Warlick used information from a study by Chris McCroskey, one of the co-founders of TweetCongress, and his team at IdeaLoop LLC, a software company he owns, reported The Hill.
Warlick also gave a basic timeline of events, from Weiner's public outing through a tweet of a photo meant for a private message to a Washington-state co-ed on May 27, to the June 6 press conference tell-all.
While both parties' Twitter activity was down, the Republicans still dominated 70-30 percent in the tweets that did circulate (not necessarily about this, obviously) from May 8 to June 8.
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