MOSAIC (Measuring Online Social Attitudes and Information Collaborative) is a collaboration between SSRS, Georgetown University, and the University of Michigan. This collaboration will focus on understanding how to leverage survey data and social media data to better capture public opinion in reliable, valid, and scientifically rigorous ways. This data brief series is intended to share public opinion results to inform researchers and decision makers with information about attitudes in the United States related to different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data briefs will utilize open-ended survey responses, social media posts, and/or both in order to gain different perspectives on public attitudes.

In this methodology brief, we apply a model-based small area estimation approach to a nationally representative survey to estimate the prevalence and characteristics of Twitter users at the state level. Researchers may find these estimates useful as benchmarks when analyzing Twitter data for state-level public opinion research, or as explanatory variables in analyzing cross-state variation in other attitudes and behaviors.