Political Expression of Academics on Twitter
We linked the Twitter accounts of over 100,000 academics to their publication records to see how scholars actually talk online. Many engage heavily with politically charged topics — climate, culture, the economy — and their tone and focus often differ sharply from the general public's. That matters because the academics who tweet are the public face of academia, even though they aren't a representative sample of it.
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Academics have traditionally played a vital role in both the generation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and narratives. Social media, relative to traditional media, provides for new and more direct ways of science communication. Yet, since not all academics may engage with social media, the sample that does so may have an outsize influence on shaping public perceptions of academia more broadly through at least two channels: the set topics they engage with and through the particular style and tone of communication. This paper describes patterns in academics' expression online found in a newly constructed global dataset covering over 100,000 scholars linking their social media content to academic record. We document large and systematic variation in politically salient academic expression concerning climate action, cultural, and economic concepts. We show that these appear to often diverge from general public opinion in both topic focus and style.
Presented at
- 10–11 Jun 2025 — Text as Data in Behavioural Economics, Potsdam