Group will study whether lawmakers are using Twitter less after Weiner scandal

TweetCongress, a website that tracks lawmakers Twitter accounts, will be studying whether members are tweeting less in the aftermath of the Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) tweeting scandal.

“We’re actually going to see about doing a study on this,” Chris McCroskey, a co-founder of the website, said.

“We are going to use the week of the scandal tweet as our baseline and the following two weeks to see if frequency in tweeting has dropped off,” he said.

{mosads}In the short term, he says he hasn’t seen any change in tweeting patterns. “I haven’t been able to detect a cooling affect.”

McCroskey said he would be interested in seeing how many lawmakers “shaved off people they followed” in the aftermath of the Weiner’s confession, saying he wondered if staffers were going through lawmakers’ lists of followers and unfollowing anyone who could be controversial.

He admits it would be difficult to study since he would need lists of the people lawmakers had followed before the scandal broke to compare to their current lists of followers.

Weiner admitted on Monday that he used his Twitter account to send a lewd picture of himself to a female college student in Washington state.

McCroskey, who owns a software company, started TweetCongress to encourage lawmakers to use Twitter. He funds the site himself.