Gender, politics and the tweeted campaign: Tweeting about issues during the uk’s 2017 general election campaign

We aimed to explore the extent to which women and men politicians tweet about different issues. We captured 82,890 tweets sent by Labour and Conservative politicians during the 2017 British general election campaign, analysed 38,255 original tweets and identified 7,651 tweets that mentioned a political issue. We also qualitatively analysed 210 tweets to better understand the content, tone and orientation of content. We suggest that gender and party, both together and separately, exert some influence on tweet topic. However, we also suggest that the particular interests of individual politicians play a role in determining the focus of their issue-based tweets.