Mark Blevis

House of Tweets, my report about the use of Twitter by elected members of Canada’s House of Commons, has drawn a lot of attention from the media. In fact, I just came from the CBC building where I was interviewed by Daniel Thibeault for TéléJournal (airing this Friday night). The more I talk about the report, the more I realize there are other measures of Twitter use by MPs that I hadn’t included in the report and people seem interested in.

For instance, I didn’t analyze the number of Twitter messages generated by each party during the assessment period. A quick check of the numbers based on my research identified that among the active Twittering MPs, the Liberals rank first for the number of Twitter messages generated (6,289), the Conservatives follow (5,209), the NDP third (4,086) and the Bloc are last (408).

The average number of Tweets generated by the actively Twittering MPs puts the Conservatives first (274), the Liberals hot on their heels (273) followed by the NDP (255) and the Bloc (102). These averages may have changed over the last few weeks, particularly since Liberal MP Denis Coderre has been absolutely on fire, publishing 1,177 Tweets between the close of the initial research (Feb. 19) and this morning (Mar. 9). The next most active Twittering MPs since the publishing of the report trail by an order of magnitude — Conservatives Patrick Brown (86) and James Moore (76). Among James Moore’s Tweets this month is the announcement that U2 lead singer Bono would like to speak with him about copyright.

Since the report was published on February 25, all of the identified dormant Twitter accounts remain dormant and NDP MP Dennis Bevington is the only MP to have opened a new account (March 3) though he hasn’t published any updates.

If I can get them in the same room for about 30 minutes, I’d like to audio record a round table discussion with James Moore, Denis Coderre and Libby Davies about Twitter as a communication tool, their approach to digital communication and engagement, and the role of digital in politics and democratic participation.