Twitter has become a center of political discourse, for everyday people and high-ranking officials in the U.S., and now a Durango man is working to bring a similar conversation to Eastern European countries.
In 2008, about 20 of the 535 members of Congress had a Twitter account, so Chris McCroskey started out to encourage adoption, calling the congressional staffers and using the mainstream media.
His message to politicians about reaching voters on Twitter was basically: “If you are not there engaging in the conversation, they are going to vote for someone who is engaging,” he said.
At the same time, he launched Tweet Congress, a nonpartisan online platform that tracks congressional tweets. It also allows users to find their representatives on Twitter and search for certain topics in tweets, like taxes.
Twitter trends among politicians in Eastern European countries mirrors that of the U.S. in 2008.
“In those places, we’re seeing very slow adoption,” he said.
So in 2017, he plans to launch a version of Tweet Congress for Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.
Those areas are also facing political instability, and Twitter could help facilitate discourse, he said.
It also allows politicians to bypass the mainstream media to reach people with a message.
President-elect Donald Trump was far more effective than Secretary Hillary Clinton at reaching his audience during the election, at a time when there was distrust of mainstream media, he said.
It was the unexpected mix of candidates in the presidential election that prompted McCroskey to relaunch Tweet Congress this fall.
“We had this unbelievable election that we had never seen before,” he said.
He shut the U.S. version down in 2013 after all the members of congress adopted Twitter.
Now the University of Arkansas plans to use Tweet Congress as a political research tool to track trends and political ideology.
McCroskey is also considering a version of Tweet Congress for the Colorado General Assembly, but he does not have any concrete plans to launch that version yet.
mshinn@durangoherald.com
