The good folks at Oppose the Future (a project of Green For All) pay close attention to the official Koch Industries twitter feed (@Koch_Industries). Recently they noticed that it's been getting increasingly defensive and political. The chart above is a plot of all of the company's tweets since the account was formed in early 2009. As you can see, after the New Yorker'sdevastating investigative piece about the Koch brothers by Jane Mayer, a switch flipped. The company stopped tweeting about, well, corporate stuff, and get very political, defending the free market, and defending Koch Industries' environmental record. After Charles Koch's recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, you see a similar spike in self-defensive tweets and free market cheerleading.
I suppose this isn't all that surprising, but it is interesting to see it all laid out. I check out a fair amount of corporate Twitter feeds from time to time, and I think it's pretty rare for companies to be so outspoken about politics. Koch Industries is a privately held company, though. I wonder if a company beholden to shareholders would get away with such blatant political messaging on a public platform.
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