Obama Tweeting and Twitted: Sotomayor’s Nomination and Health Care Reform

Having established the significance of young voters in the election of President Obama, this paper focuses on how they using micro-blogging social network site Twitter have affected the political discourse of the Obama administration centering on two of the most controversial political agendas of the Obama administration’s first 100 days – the legislation battle on health care reform and the nomination and confirmation of the first Hispanic female Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor. This paper attempts to measure how this Obama followers react to these two politically important agendas as evidenced by their tweeting, replying, re-tweeting, and searching for further information. Despite a big difference between the total number of tweets and the amount of followers on both health care and Sotomayor nomination issues, an average of more than 1.5 million followers of President Obama’s account and around 450,000 followers of the White House account clearly shows a strong sign of engagement in the Twitter network.ed by author.