Political Expression of Academics on Twitter 

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 tracks how nearly 100,000 scholars from 174 countries express themselves on Twitter / X. We link 296 million tweets (2016 – 2022) to each scholar’s publications in OpenAlex, then use large-language-model (LLM) classifiers to label

* what they talk about (climate action; immigration & race; welfare, tax, redistribution)

* how they talk (egocentrism, toxicity, emotional vs. reasoned language)

* who is talked to (followers, engagement, academic credibility)

Core questions

• How do scholars’ political stances differ from each other – and from the general public?

• Do tone and style vary by field, gender, institution ranking or geography?

• Does online prominence mirror offline expertise, or is there a gap?

For the full research: Garg, P. & Fetzer, T. (2025), ‘Political Expression of Academics on Twitter’, Published at Nature Human Behaviour. Link to paper

View media coverage:  Marginal Revolution, Matthew Yglesias, Noahpinion.blog, VoxEU and Paper's Backstory

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

• A small, hyper-active minority (top 5 %) creates ~25 % of academic tweets and garners ~40 % of followers, yet often have fewer citations than average – signalling a reach-versus-expertise gap.

• Compared with a random U.S. Twitter sample, U.S. academics are ≈ 9 × more supportive of climate action and notably more culturally liberal and economically collectivist.

• Within academia, stance varies systematically by field (STEM > SocSci > Humanities on climate), gender (women slightly more liberal/collectivist), institution rank, and country.

Tone & style

• Scholars write in a more self-referential (“I /me”) style than the general population; egocentrism is highest among U.S. scholars and those at top-100 universities.

• Overall toxicity is lower than general Twitter, but humanities and top-ranked-institution accounts are outliers, posting more toxic tweets.

• Emotional-to-reasoning language has edged upward, especially among high-reach, low-credibility accounts.

Temporal dynamics, 2016 – 2022

• Support for climate action has trended upward, with both techno-optimist and behavioural-adjustment narratives growing.

• Egocentrism has increased steadily; toxicity has declined; emotionality has risen.

• Pandemic years saw a brief dip in climate-action tweets and a modest uptick in economic-collectivism discourse.

Take-away

The loudest academic voices online do not always map to the most-cited scholars offline, and the resulting skew may shape how the public perceives “scientific consensus.” The paper is descriptive, not causal – but it flags where future work (and cautious self-reflection by scholars) is most needed.