While it’s no secret that social media shapes our political discourse, a new study by the Pew Research Center reveals to what extent. Nearly one in three tweets posted by American adults are political in nature, according to Pew’s analysis of a sample of a year’s worth of English-language tweets from US adults. But only eight percent of the original tweets Pew analyzed were political in nature, while more than 40 percent of retweets and quote tweets were classified as political. This shows that users are a lot more likely to share political content from a small group rather than create their own.It’s important to note that the study analyzed tweets that were posted between May 2020 and May 2021 — a particularly tumultuous time period that included a US presidential election, a summer of political protests, a pandemic and the January 6 insurrection. It’s a significant uptick from 2019, when only 13 percent of US tweets were about politics. But Pew also significantly changed
