How do mass shootings shape the social media discourse on guns in the US Congress? Causal discovery and topic modeling

Social media platforms have become a key tool for politicians to signal their policy positions and communicate about issues that are salient to them and their constituency. One such issue is gun violence. Grounded in framing and issue-attention cycle theories, this paper analyzes the response of members of the United States (US) Congress to mass shootings on social media. We analyzed 785,881 gun-related tweets from members of the 117th US Congress on X (formerly Twitter) between January 2021 and January 2023. We used logistic regression to model the main effects, implemented the PCMCI+ algorithm for causal discovery, and applied latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling to evaluate the substantive differences between gun-related tweets from the two parties. Higher fatality counts were positively correlated with the probability of gun-related tweets by Congress members (OR=1.13, 95% CI=[1.12, 1.15], p < 0.001). A causal link was detected between mass shootings and subsequent legislators' activity on X (ρ=0.122, p=0.001). Democrats were more likely to tweet about guns following mass shootings than Republicans (OR=3.60, 95% CI=[3.03, 4.28], p < 0.001), with qualitative differences in tweet substance between parties (community, families, victims, and mass shootings themselves are recurrent topics for Democrats, while Second Amendment rights and crime are frequent for Republicans). The paper suggests that while mass shootings elevate the level of discussion on guns in Congress, they trigger different reactions depending on party affiliation. Congress members tend to focus on topics aligned with party issues, likely reducing the opportunity for policy-making alignment.