From the beat to the tweet: the use of Twitter (X) by police officers

Purpose The police regularly incorporate social media into their outreach portfolios. Although much social media is handled at the organizational-level, some police officers also use social media in a professional capacity at the individual-level. Little research, however, has examined how individual police officers engage with social media. As part of the present research, we explored how individual police officers use Twitter (now named X): a popular microblogging platform. Design/methodology/approach We constructed a dataset of police officers who use Twitter in a professional capacity at the individual-level. We then extracted and coded tweets from the public accounts of such officers to analyze their characteristics. We also examined potential differences in Twitter use by officer gender, officer rank, and frequency of posting. Findings Our analyses revealed that individual police officers largely use Twitter to push content rather than pull information or network, mirroring organizational-level trends. Our analyses also revealed some differences in posting practices as a function of officer characteristics. Originality/value Most previous research regarding social media in policing has examined police social media practices at the organizational-level. For our research, we explored police social media practices at the individual-level – assessing the characteristics of police officers who use Twitter in a professional capacity as well as the characteristics of their tweets.