As Twitter becomes a more common means for officials to communicate with their constituents, it becomes more important that we understand how officials use these communication tools. Using data from 380 members of Congress' Twitter activity during the winter of 2012, we find that officials frequently use Twitter to advertise their political positions and to provide information but rarely to request political action from their constituents or to recognize the good work of others. We highlight a number of differences in communication frequency between men and women, Senators and Representatives, Republicans and Democrats. We provide groundwork for future research examining the behavior of public officials online and testing the predictive power of officials' social media behavior.

Online abusive behavior affects millions and the NLP community has attempted to mitigate this problem by developing technologies to detect abuse. However, current methods have largely focused on a narrow definition of abuse to detriment of victims who seek both validation and solutions. In this position paper, we argue that the community needs to make three substantive changes: (1) expanding our scope of problems to tackle both more subtle and more serious forms of abuse, (2) developing proactive technologies that counter or inhibit abuse before it harms, and (3) reframing our effort within a framework of justice to promote healthy communities.

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The conventional understanding of how elected officials affect the policy agenda is based on the argument that they use symbols and rhetoric to propagate a policy problem, primarily through the traditional media. The arguments presented in this article are largely consistent with this claim but account for the function of social media. More specifically, and framed by indexing theory, we argue that social media enhances opportunities for policy agenda builders in the U.S. Congress to share information with journalists. Across the key policy issues of 2013, tests for congruence between politicians' Twitter posts and New York Times articles confirm a connection, particularly for the policy issue areas of the economy, immigration, health care, and marginalized groups. Simultaneous discussion and debate between Democrats and Republicans about a particular policy issue area, however, negatively impact how the New York Times indexes a particular issue.

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