Political Expression of Academics on Social Media 

Welcome to the Academic Social Media Expression Project

Academics have traditionally played a vital role in both the generation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and narratives. In today's digital age, social media platforms offer new and more direct ways of science communication.

This project explores the patterns in academics' expressions online, using a newly constructed global dataset covering over 100,000 scholars, linking their social media content to their academic records.

The study aims to understand how academics present themselves to the public on social media. Key questions include:

• What do their expressed political stances look like?

• Do these stances vary significantly across authors or fields of study?

• To what extent do academics on social media represent the diversity of views and perspectives across different institutions, countries, and fields of study?

For the full research: Garg, P. & Fetzer, T. (2024), ‘Political Expression of Academics on Social Media’, Forthcoming at Nature Human Behaviour. View preprint

View media coverage:  Marginal Revolution, Matthew Yglesias, Noahpinion.blog, VoxEU

This website

We showcase main figures from the paper in form of

• Levels  and Trends in stance and style of expression 

• Archetypical Content and Radars

• University Radars of average stance

• Access the data

• Our Team and FAQs

Key Findings

Political Expression

• Academics on social media are significantly more expressive about their stances compared to the general population. For example, the average climate action stance for academics is 10.7 times more expressive than that of the general US social media population.

• There are notable differences in political expression among academics based on field, institution ranking, gender, and country of affiliation.

Tone and Style of Expression

• Academics use more self-referential language and show higher egocentrism, especially among US-based academics and those at top-ranked institutions.

• While academic discourse is generally less toxic compared to the general population, humanities scholars and those from top 100 institutions tend to exhibit higher levels of toxicity.

Temporal Dynamics

• There has been a notable increase in support for climate action, especially through technological solutions.

• Egocentrism is on the rise, while toxicity is declining.