Politicians Tweet Climate
I run a twitter-bot that scrapes the accounts of MPs and congresspeople for tweets about climate and climate change. It does this by periodically reviewing the tweets from a list of accounts in a database. If the tweets contain strings (words) like “climate” or “global warming” then it retweets them. The UK feed is @PTClimate_UK
Why is this interesting? I recently began saving tweets more systematically and plan to do some data-analysis on how politicians communicate this issue. Perhaps more interesting is that once you track climate-related tweets, you can also analyse the responses.
The feed is also useful if you want to follow climate-related discourse from politicians without hearing their other ramblings. Currently the feed has 680 followers presumably for this purpose.
Finally, should enough people follow the feed for the above reasons, I’m hoping that politicians will begin to feel an incentive to tweet about climate (because these tweets will have the added, engaged audience of my feed). I think there need to be more followers of my feed for this effect to become relevant.
Currently (28/12/2018) the UK feed has retweeted 595 tweets (2.5 per week). I’ll be doing more analysis once the dataset is larger, including that of the US feed.