The lesson here for members of Congress might be to avoid engaging in inappropriate online romances altogether, or at the very least, to be more cautious when sending direct messages. But, preliminary data in the aftermath of Weinergate shows that the actual lesson Congress members are taking to heart is to avoid Twitter altogether.
TweetCongress, a site aggregating tweets from members of Congress, looked at the Twitter activities of Democrats and Republicans from May 9 to June 8, with weekends excluded, and found that tweets from members of both parties are down roughly 30% since Weiner’s lewd photo.
The infographic below includes a timeline of Weinergate-related events, as well as color-coded graphs on how the 232 active Republican Congress members on Twitter and the 168 active Democratic Congress members on Twitter have changed their tweeting ways.