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Article History

Received: 29 April 2023

Accepted: 12 October 2023

First Online: 31 October 2023

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: We did not seek ethical approval as we analysed data made public by the original creators of the data—public posts from MPs. To address the ethical issues involved with this project, we consulted the Association of Internet Researchers’ <i>Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0</i> (Franzke et al. CitationRef removed). In line with these guidelines, at each step of the research, we tried to minimize the potential harm and risks to the subjects while maintaining the informative value of our report—including not storing and sharing the exact texts of the individual posts once they were coded and not including any communication by MPs that could under any circumstances be considered private.

: We did not seek informed consent from the participants as the data we collected were public and we consider our research to be observational in the public space. Our data were public in the broadest definition—the data were available on public social media pages available to anyone, the participants were public personas, and the posts were created with a clear intention of making them public (Willis, CitationRef removed).