Going rogue: what scientists can learn about Twitter communication from "alt" government accounts.

Matthew J Wilson,Elizabeth K Perkin

doi:10.7717/peerj.12407

Abstract

The inauguration of President Trump in the United States led to the active restriction of science communication from federal agencies, resulting in the creation of many unofficial “alt” Twitter accounts to maintain communication. Alt accounts had many followers (e.g., 15 accounts had > 100,000) and received a large amount of media attention, making them ideal for better understanding how differences in messaging can affect public engagement with science on microblogging platforms. We analyzed tweets produced by alt and corresponding official agency accounts to compare the two groups and determine if specific features of a tweet made them more likely to be retweeted or liked to help the average scientist potentially reach a broader audience on Twitter. We found adding links, images, hashtags, and mentions, as well as expressing angry and annoying sentiments all increased retweets and likes. Evidence-based terms such as “peer-review” had high retweet rates but linking directly to peer-reviewed publications decreased attention compared to popular science websites. Word choice and attention did not reflect official or alt account types, indicating topic is more important than source. The number of tweets generated and attention received by alt accounts has decreased since their creation, demonstrating the importance of timeliness in science communication on social media. Together our results show potential pathways for scientists to increase efficacy in Twitter communications.

Highlights

Since its inception in 2006, the microblogging social media platform Twitter has dramatically changed the science communication landscape, allowing scientists to communicate directly with a broad audience as well as one another
We identified all official US federal Twitter accounts with an ‘‘alt’’ or ‘‘rogue’’ corollary handle that could be linked with a single federal agency and collected total followers, tweets, likes, and accounts followed for each account on 1 April 2017 by searching Twitter with the terms ‘‘rogue’’ and ‘‘alt’’ identifying the official account that was the intended target of each alt account (Table S1)
Studying the strategies of alt government accounts allowed us to learn what emotions and tweet characteristics were associated with higher levels of likes and retweets

Summary

Introduction

Since its inception in 2006, the microblogging social media platform Twitter has dramatically changed the science communication landscape, allowing scientists to communicate directly with a broad audience as well as one another. Many scientists create tight networks across media platforms where they primarily communicate with other scientists (Wilson et al, 2016) which can undermine the potential of social media platforms like Twitter to reach large audiences and implement real-world change (Letierce et al, 2010). When scientists are able to expand their network of followers it has the potential to increase their citation rate (Peoples et al, 2016; Lamb, Gilbert & Ford, 2018), and readership among the media and general public (Côté & Darling, 2018), demonstrating the value of social media platforms when used effectively. Analyses of microblogging data have improved our understanding of how topics such as conservation awareness and media coverage (Acerbi et al, 2020), common vs Latin species name use (Jarić et al, 2016), and informal citizen science (Daume & Galaz, 2016) reach lay audiences

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