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Last month, in CJR’s new Journalism 2050 issue, Kyle Paoletta described a model of political communication that might be called “direct to consumer.” The “internet election” of 2008, he wrote, evolved into the “Twitter election” of 2016 and eventually the “podcast election” of 2024. Whatever the next election will be called, one thing is clear: American politicians are increasingly bypassing traditional media gatekeepers and speaking directly to constituents.

To better understand this phenomenon, we downloaded the official Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram accounts of every senator, representative, and governor in the country. While some politicians have moved on to other social media, like Bluesky and Truth Social, the mainstream platforms give us a window into which politicians have mastered the art of communicating with constituents online and how those communications might evolve.

Importantly, our analysis excludes personal accounts and campaign accounts, and focuses only on the official accounts that each politician uses in their capacity as an occupant of an elected office. This is because official accounts are subject to different rules. For instance, official government accounts cannot block constituents who criticize them; the Supreme Court ruled in* Trump v. Knight First Amendment Institute *that this would run afoul of the First Amendment. A recent Supreme Court decision, Lindke v. Freed, defined an official account as one where the account holder has the authority to speak for the government on a topic and exercises that authority in their posts.

The Lindke decision makes it extremely difficult for the public to claim First Amendment access rights to officials’ personal pages—although many still keep a public personal profile—which may explain why the real political theater sometimes happens on the personal accounts where constitutional constraints are less tight.

Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her personal Twitter account (@AOC) has amassed over twelve million followers, but is not included in our collection. This account is more politically driven, and has posts like one advocating for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani during his campaign—something she could not do on her official account (@RepAOC), which, as the profile for a representative from the NY-14 district, is much smaller than her personal account; it just barely hits seven hundred and fifty thousand followers.

On Instagram, however, it’s a different story. Even though Ocasio-Cortez’s personal account (@AOC) has 9.5 million followers—more than her official government account (@RepAOC), which has 2.7 million—the latter is among the most popular of any official political pages and contains professionally stylized posts informing constituents about their immigration rights.

To see how politicians fare on newer and more visual media, we also pulled their TikTok accounts. But for this platform we included both official and unofficial accounts. That’s because very few elected officials hold accounts on the platform at all, and fewer yet advertise them as official communications on their government websites. The TikTok deal President Trump supposedly brokered has yet to be formally finalized, and the platform is still banned on government-owned technology. Despite the White House’s recent embrace of the platform, the elected officials who have built successful followings on TikTok are still mostly Democrats.

While some Republicans have joined TikTok, not many have found success there. Rand Paul, for instance, joined the platform in protest of the possible banning of the platform. “Why am I joining TikTok, just as the government ban begins? Because I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like being told what I can think or what I can say,” he said in his first post on the platform. “The courts may think there’s an exemption to the First Amendment. I don’t. I joined TikTok today as a form of civil disobedience.” He has barely posted since.

As the social media environment has fractured, some politicians have moved to more partisan platforms. Bluesky gained popularity among journalists and academics and so too, it seems, among Democratic politicians. To see how much elected officials have moved away from mainstream platforms, we navigated to every governor’s, senator’s, and representative’s official website and collected the mentions of any social media platform on their homepage.

While right-leaning platforms like Truth Social, Rumble, and Parler are only listed on a handful of websites of Republican officials, more than two-thirds of Democratic congresspeople and about 40 percent of Democratic governors listed Bluesky accounts. Most elected officials from either party still listed mainstream social platforms—including X.

While the past two decades have been characterized by politicians experimenting with social media, the conversations on these platforms are not dominated by them. For instance, @whitehouse and @realdonaldtrump have 10.6 million and 39.2 million followers, respectively, on Instagram, compared with 19.6 million followers of @newyorktimes and 29.6 million followers of @bbcnews. (Of course, celebrities like Taylor Swift and Cristiano Ronaldo blow all these accounts out of the water, with 281 million and 668 million followers, respectively.) Politicians may intend to bypass the press and speak directly to constituents, but an independent press can still hold power to account by not ceding the social media audience to politicians and focusing its efforts on reaching the same audiences to contextualize and challenge political narratives.

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