Self Promotion in US Congressional Tweets

Abstract

Prior studies have found that women selfpromote less than men due to gender stereotypes. In this study we built a BERT-based NLP model to predict whether a Congressional tweet shows self-promotion or not and then used this model to examine whether a gender gap in self-promotion exists among Congressional tweets. After analyzing 2 million Congressional tweets from July 2017 to March 2021, controlling for a number of factors that include political party, chamber, age, number of terms in Congress, number of daily tweets, and number of followers, we found that women in Congress actually perform more self-promotion on Twitter, indicating a reversal of traditional gender norms where women self-promote less than men.

Automatic Identification and Classification of Bragging in Social Media

“…On the other hand, bragging is about aspects that are positively valued by the audience with the goal of improving the speaker's self-image. Bak et al (2014a) aim to predict different levels of self-disclosure statements, from general to sensitive; while Wang et al (2021) examine gender differences in selfpromotion by Congress members on Twitter. Bragging also involves in some cases possessions (Chinnappa and Blanco, 2018).…”