The Peaceful Transition of Government Twitter Accounts

The various committees of the House of Representatives are strange, human institutions. They are staffed by whoever holds the majority, which, since January of 2011, had been the Republicans, but is now the Democrats.

And with that change, the committees must deal with important business, such as establishing new chairpeople, deciding on organizing principles, and … handling the committee Twitter account.

The journalist in this Twitter handover process. For eight years, the Republicans ran the account. During that time, it accumulated a lot of followers (168,000) as Twitter grew into a mainstream service. Meanwhile, the Democrats had their own minority account—@SciCmteDems, which was clearly the Democrats and not an organ of the government—which accumulated almost 150,000 fewer followers.