Outcome:

High ratio: Yes

High engagement: Yes

Policy importance: Yes

X factor: Yes

The Ratio Richter does it all. It captures the high engagement, high ratio, policy based tweets that have the X factor we’re looking for. From Bill Cassidy’s shameless lie that his bill wouldn’t take healthcare coverage from people with preexisting conditions to Lisa Murkowski announcing her support for the Paul Ryan tax scam to John Corryn kind of defending a school shooter(?), these tweets get expose the worst of the worst that twitter has to offer.

What Get’s Richter’d

The next step with the ratio scale is to see what actually gets Richter'd. To do that, we created the Bad Tweet Hall of fame, the list of 100 tweets with the highest values on the Ratio Richter scale.

One thing that the Richter makes clear is that big policy battles really are the things that get the most attention on Twitter. While Tucker Carlson claims that the left is obsessed with Mueller and the Russian investigation, the vast majority of tweets in the Ratio Hall of Fame are about serious policy issues.

In fact, Obamacare Repeal and the Republican tax bill, the two most significant policy battles of Trump’s presidency, make up over half of the tweets in Bad Tweet Hall of Fame.

The next two were the events in the aftermath of the Parkland shootings and the confirmation battles around Betsy Devos. While less explicitly tied to a specific policy, both of these are consistent with an online discourse focused around high profile policy battles.

One concerning thing is the lack of highly ratio’d tweets connected to the judiciary. With Republicans having stolen a Supreme Court seat from Obama in order to appoint a far right ideologue in Neil Gorsuch, we would hope to see sustained pressure towards Republicans on this front. This fits in with ongoing Data for Progress research showing that Democrats significantly underestimate both the importance of the judiciary and the threat it poses to the progressive agenda.