ABSTRACT
The purpose of this research is to better understand how public officials utilize Twitter in a specific policy context, using signs and symbols that align closely or loosely with written policy - in this case, policy actions related to a particularly contentious recent policy issue: reform efforts for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also referred to as the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare). The research question asked is: What can tweets about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to key senators during a critical policy period tell us about signs and symbols employed in the discourse? As a corollary, what can we know from an exploration of the tweets about the thinking and interaction patterns of Twitter users, with regard to this policy debate? 290,000 tweets were scraped to form the corpus for analysis, covering the period before and after Graham-Cassidy amendment; from this, I derived a subset to focus on tweets to Senator John McCain. LIWC2015 was used for the analysis; I found that tweets about ACA during this period were more analytic and less authentic than what are typically found on Twitter; the tweets have a more negative tone than usual. McCain's presence became less about his status as a senator and person, and more symbolic. Social networks are especially relevant given recent discussion about their role in shaping public opinion and acting as a virtual public square, but this research casts serious doubt about the efficacy of these platforms for those public purposes.
