Twitter is quickly turning into a political machine. Politicians are tweeting campaign slogans, behind-the-scenes pictures and calls-to-action for citizens to go out and vote.

And now Twitter is entering the coveted political donation arena. New stats from Twitter Advertising show that users who see paid advertising from politicians visit campaign donation websites 97 percent more frequently than those who don’t.
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Late last week, Twitter launched a new official account to track interesting uses of the site by governments, organizations and political figures.
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Yatterbox is a new website that aggregates the tweets, status updates, RSS feeds and more of politicians around the world, so you can see what they’re up to on social media. And in a new infographic looking at the data gathered by Yatterbox thus far, it looks like UK politicians are pretty tweet-obsessed.
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Colin Crowell will be joining the Twitter team as the new Head of Global Public Policy. Formerly a senior advisor to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, Crowell will join Adam Sharp in Washington D.C. as the second employee in Twitter’s two-person D.C. team.
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UK politicians are now legally required to answer a Freedom of Information (FoI) request made via Twitter, on Twitter. That means that if documents, clarification on a statement, or any other information is requested by a journalist or citizen on Twitter, public officials must respond within a reasonable period of time, on Twitter itself.
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They may sit on different sides of the aisle, but UK Members of Parliament share at least one thing in common: they love Twitter.

According to new research, MPs are spending about 1,000 hours a year on Twitter. And to put that into perspective, the House of Commons sat for 540 hours and 13 minutes in the 2009-2010 session.
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If you follow @BarackObama, you’ll get to hear from the President himself from time to time on the campaign trail and from Washington.
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Think you’re good at hiding your political affiliations? Think again. New research suggests that your political ideology is given away by the connections you have on Twitter.
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There have been many cases of political legislatures banning the use of Twitter during meetings, apparently in an effort to reduce distractions and get more out of the politicians themselves. This is an extremely patronizing and limited way to engage with new technology, and will only result in a step backwards for those legislatures – and is really only a temporary measure against the inevitable adoption of Twitter, in the end.
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With the announcement of Twitter’s recent hire of a D.C. rep to train politicians on their tweeting habits, it’s clear that politicians are using Twitter now more than ever before. Two economic researchers from the University of Toronto saw the growing presence of politicians on Twitter, and wanted to find out exactly why the Washington elite is flocking to the microblogging service. While “more exposure” or “to campaign” might be the knee-jerk answers to this questions, the research findings are much more surprising.
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