“Twitter has proven to be a revolutionary social network even in politics. It is an extraordinary channel of diplomacy and of communication.” – Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Over the past eight years, the Twittersphere has expanded to incorporate mass amounts of people from all facets of the political spectrum, all over the world. A recent study under the name of Twiplomacy has amalgamated data from Twitter to categorically display political participation within the social platform. This initiative was put forth by an American agency called Burson-Marsteller, who has gathered data from the 669 Twitter accounts of government members, including world leaders, heads of states, foreign ministers, as well as public institutions in 166 countries. They used 60 variables, including the number of mutual peer connections, number of followers, number of retweets, appearance on Twitter lists, tweets per day, percentage of @replies, and the year world leaders signed up to Twitter.