Mark Graham posed a question to me earlier today asking what we know about the Twitter accounts of the members of Congress, specifically whether they have been removed after they left office. The hypothesis was that some members of the House and Senate may decide to delete their account on leaving DC.

I was immediately reminded of the excellent congress-legislators project which collects all kinds of information about House and Senate members including their social media accounts into YAML files that are versioned in a GitHub repository. GitHub is a great place to curate a dataset like this because it allows anyone with a GitHub account to contribute to editing the data, and to share utilities to automate checks and modifications.

Unfortunately the file that tracks social media accounts is only for current members. Once they leave office they are removed from the file. The project does track other historical information for legislators. But the social media data isn’t pulled in when this transition happens, or so it seems.

Luckily Git doesn’t forget. Since the project is using a version control system all of the previously known social media links are in the history of the repository! So I wrote a small program that uses gitpython to walk the legislators-social-media.yaml file backwards in time through each commit, parse the YAML at that previous state, and merge that information into a union of all the current and past legislator information. You can see the resulting program and output in us-legislators-social.

There’s a little bit of a wrinkle in that not everything in the version history should be carried forward because errors were corrected and bugs were fixed. Without digging into the diffs and analyzing them more it’s hard to say whether a commit was a bug fix or if it was simply adding new or deleting old information. If the YAML doesn’t parse at a particular state that’s easy to ignore.

It also looks like the maintainers split out account ids from account usernames at one point. Derek Willis helpfully pointed out to me that Twitter don’t care about the capitalization of usernames in URLs, so these needed to be normalized when merging the data. The same is true of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. I guarded against these cases but if you notice other problems let me know.

With the resulting merged historical data it’s not too hard to write a program to read in the data, identify the politicians who left office after the 116th Congress, and examine their Twitter accounts to see that they are live. It turned out to be a little bit harder than I expected because it’s not as easy as you might think to check if a Twitter account is live or not.

Twitter’s web servers return a HTTP 200 OK message even when responding to requests for URLs of non-existent accounts. To complicate things further the error message that displays indicating it is not an account only displays when the page is rendered in a browser. So a simple web scraping job that looks at the HTML is not sufficient.

And finally just because a Twitter username no longer seems to work, it’s possible that the user has changed it to a new screen_name. Fortunately the unitedstates project also tracks the Twitter User ID (sometimes). If the user account is still there you can use the Twitter API to look up their current screen_name and see if it is different.

After putting all this together it’s possible to generate a simple table of legislators who left office at the end of the 116th Congress, and their Twitter account information.

name	url	url_ok	user_id	new_url
Lamar Alexander	https://twitter.com/senalexander	True	76649729
Michael B. Enzi	https://twitter.com/senatorenzi	True	291756142
Pat Roberts	https://twitter.com/senpatroberts	True	75364211
Tom Udall	https://twitter.com/senatortomudall	True	60828944
Justin Amash	https://twitter.com/justinamash	True	233842454
Rob Bishop	https://twitter.com/reprobbishop	True	148006729
K. Michael Conaway	https://twitter.com/conawaytx11	True	295685416
Susan A. Davis	https://twitter.com/repsusandavis	False	432771620
Eliot L. Engel	https://twitter.com/repeliotengel	True	164007407
Bill Flores	https://twitter.com/repbillflores	False	237312687
Cory Gardner	https://twitter.com/sencorygardner	True	235217558
Peter T. King	https://twitter.com/reppeteking	True	18277655
Steve King	https://twitter.com/stevekingia	True	48117116
Daniel Lipinski	https://twitter.com/replipinski	True	1009269193
David Loebsack	https://twitter.com/daveloebsack	True	510516465
Nita M. Lowey	https://twitter.com/nitalowey	True	221792092
Kenny Marchant	https://twitter.com/repkenmarchant	True	23976316
Pete Olson	https://twitter.com/reppeteolson	True	20053279
Martha Roby	https://twitter.com/repmartharoby	False	224294785	https://twitter.com/MarthaRobyAL
David P. Roe	https://twitter.com/drphilroe	True	52503751
F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.	https://twitter.com/jimpressoffice	False	851621377
José E. Serrano	https://twitter.com/repjoseserrano	True	33563161
John Shimkus	https://twitter.com/repshimkus	True	15600527
Mac Thornberry	https://twitter.com/mactxpress	True	377534571
Scott R. Tipton	https://twitter.com/reptipton	True	242873057
Peter J. Visclosky	https://twitter.com/repvisclosky	True	193872188
Greg Walden	https://twitter.com/repgregwalden	True	32010840
Rob Woodall	https://twitter.com/reprobwoodall	True	2382685057
Ted S. Yoho	https://twitter.com/reptedyoho	True	1071900114
Doug Collins	https://twitter.com/repdougcollins	True	1060487274
Tulsi Gabbard	https://twitter.com/tulsipress	True	1064206014
Susan W. Brooks	https://twitter.com/susanwbrooks	True	1074101017
Joseph P. Kennedy III	https://twitter.com/repjoekennedy	False	1055907624	https://twitter.com/joekennedy
George Holding	https://twitter.com/repholding	True	1058460818
Denny Heck	https://twitter.com/repdennyheck	False	1068499286	https://twitter.com/LtGovDennyHeck
Bradley Byrne	https://twitter.com/repbyrne	True	2253968388
Ralph Lee Abraham	https://twitter.com/repabraham	True	2962891515
Will Hurd	https://twitter.com/hurdonthehill	True	2963445730
David Perdue	https://twitter.com/sendavidperdue	True	2863210809
Mark Walker	https://twitter.com/repmarkwalker	True	2966205003
Francis Rooney	https://twitter.com/reprooney	True	816111677917851649
Paul Mitchell	https://twitter.com/reppaulmitchell	True	811632636598910976
Doug Jones	https://twitter.com/sendougjones	True	941080085121175552
TJ Cox	https://twitter.com/reptjcox	True	1080875913926139910
Gilbert Ray Cisneros, Jr.	https://twitter.com/repgilcisneros	True	1080986167003230208
Harley Rouda	https://twitter.com/repharley	True	1075080722241736704
Ross Spano	https://twitter.com/reprossspano	True	1090328229548826627
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell	https://twitter.com/repdmp	True	1080941062028447744
Donna E. Shalala	https://twitter.com/repshalala	False	1060584809095925762
Abby Finkenauer	https://twitter.com/repfinkenauer	True	1081256295469068288
Steve Watkins	https://twitter.com/rep_watkins	False	1080307235350241280
Xochitl Torres Small	https://twitter.com/reptorressmall	True	1080830346915209216
Max Rose	https://twitter.com/repmaxrose	True	1078692057940742144
Anthony Brindisi	https://twitter.com/repbrindisi	True	1080978331535896576
Kendra S. Horn	https://twitter.com/repkendrahorn	False	1083019402046513152	https://twitter.com/KendraSHorn
Joe Cunningham	https://twitter.com/repcunningham	True	1080198683713507335
Ben McAdams	https://twitter.com/repbenmcadams	False	196362083	https://twitter.com/BenMcAdamsUT
Denver Riggleman	https://twitter.com/repriggleman	True	1080504024695222273

In most cases where the account has been updated the individual simply changed their Twitter username, sometimes remove “Rep” from it–like RepJoeKennedy to JoeKennedy. As an aside I’m kind of surprised that Twitter username wasn’t taken to be honest. Maybe that’s a perk of having a verified account or of being a politician? But if you look closely you can see there were a few that seemed to have deleted their account altogether:

name	url	url_ok	user_id
Susan A. Davis	https://twitter.com/repsusandavis	False	432771620
Bill Flores	https://twitter.com/repbillflores	False	237312687
F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.	https://twitter.com/jimpressoffice	False	851621377
Donna E. Shalala	https://twitter.com/repshalala	False	1060584809095925762
Steve Watkins	https://twitter.com/rep_watkins	False	1080307235350241280

There are two notable exceptions to this. The first is Vice President Kamala Harris. My logic for determining if a person was leaving Congress was to see if they served in a term ending on 2021-01-03, and weren’t serving in a term starting then. But Harris is different because her term as a Senator is listed as ending on 2021-01-18. Her old account @senkamalaharris is no longer available, but her Twitter User ID is still active and is now attached to the account at @VP. The other of course is Joe Biden, who stopped being a senator in order to become the President. His Twitter account remains the same at @joebiden.

It’s worth highlighting here how there seems to be no uniform approach to handling this process. In one case @senkamalaharris is temporarily blessed as the VP, with a unified account history underneath. In the other there is a separation between @joebiden and @POTUS. It seems like Twitter has some work to do on managing identities, or maybe the Congress needs to prescribe a set of procedures? Or maybe I’m missing part of the picture, and that just as @RepJoeKennedy somehow changed back to @JoeKennedy there is some namespace management going on behind the scenes?

If you are interested in other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube the unitedstates project tracks information for those platforms too. I merged that information into the legislators.yaml file I discussed here if you want to try to check them. I think that one thing this experiment shows is that if the platform allows for usernames to be changed it is critical to track the user id as well. I didn’t do the work to check that those accounts exist. But that’s a project for another day.

I’m not sure this list of five deleted accounts is terribly interesting at the end of all this. Possibly? But on the plus side I did learn how to interact with Git better from Python, which is something I can imagine returning to in the future. It’s not every day that you have to think of the versions of a dataset as an important feature of the data, outside of serving as a backup that can be reverted to if necessary. But of course data changes in time, and if seeing that data over time is useful, then the revision history takes on a new significance. It’s nothing new to see version control systems as critical data provenance technologies, but it felt new to actually use one that way to answer a question. Thanks Mark!