How many Twitter employees made political donations in 2020?

December 3, 2022 10:53 AM

In Matt Taibbi's "Twitter Files" thread he included a screenshot showing Twitter employees making $968,749 in political donations in 2020, the vast majority of which went to Democrats. Twitter had around 5,500 employees in 2020. How many of them made political donations?
posted by bdk3clash to Law & Government (5 answers total)

Donations are public record and are available on the FEC website. Export this data and count the number of unique names in the contributor name field. I just did that and got 1096 unique names who made a total of $970,266 in contributions during 2020 and listed their employer as Twitter or "Twitter, Inc.",
posted by caek at 10:56 AM on December 3, 2022

caek, does that include donations to campaigns at the state and city or county level?
posted by brainwane at 11:19 AM on December 3, 2022

I doubt the FEC data includes local or state contributions. To get a comprehensive number, someone would have to search innumerable jurisdictions.
posted by NotLost at 11:37 AM on December 3, 2022

brainwave: no, but the dollar amount is close to the number in Taibbi’s transparently bad faith rant about well known revenge porn moderation policies (“the twitter files”) so I assume he’s talking specifically about federal contributions.

I also think it’s reasonable to assume that the number of people who make local contributions without making federal contributions (i.e. contributed to political campaigns but are not in this list of ~1000 employees) is pretty small relative to the total.
posted by caek at 11:43 AM on December 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: bdk3clash: The screenshot comes from OpenSecrets which basically does not track donations made in state-level, county-level, or city-level races. It's hard for an independent researcher to find all the donations one person/entity has made across all those jurisdictions, at least as of 2017 when I posted an Ask about it.
posted by brainwane at 3:11 PM on December 3, 2022