This page is a list of US Senators (I added Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton) in order of how likely they are to give the source for figures they use.

The ranking uses the politician’s Twitter streams. The method is a little bit of a blunt instrument, but it makes some points nicely.

The list works like this:

gather recent tweets by the politicians.

take those that involve numbers (because we are interested in if they reference their figures)

check if they contain a URL.

So this is good:

…and this is bad:

We’re looking at the most important part of information sharing here. If we are to have grown-up conversations we must use information that can be checked. The first step is simply information is saying where your information came from. It makes no claims about the sources that are used – we weight a peer reviewed study as highly as a Yahoo Answers page – the only interest here is if the source is there at all.

You can view the first list here. I checked how good the idea was with humans (and the UK dataset) here and it worked very well. I’m certainly happy that the list is the most simple and visible way of making politicians aware of the information they are putting out.

All of the code is in GitHub, and if you’d like to look at the list a single account you will find it here.

For the first list, someone on reddit said something very important (about the UK version, but it holds):

I think it’s pretty clear that the top 20% of those MPs are doing something right methodologically, compared to the bottom 20%. But I’d be careful of singling out any individual case with such a blunt tool. Especially if all 5 are from the same party

…and you should take that as your general guide. If your representative. is in the bottom half of the table, there is probably something wrong…