Data collection
The number of social media posts containing both subject matter and URE markers posted between March 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021 (to align with the beginning of the intervention and the end of many state legislative sessions, respectively), was used as the dependent variable for analyses. Each URE category phrase was searched within COVID-related social media posts. The counts of how many social media posts a state legislator produced that satisfied these Boolean phrases were returned using Quorum. Re-posts and shared posts (e.g., retweets) were excluded. The counts across URE categories were added to obtain a total count of social media posts related to COVID using URE. Additional data were collected during a baseline period (March 1, 2019–February 29, 2020) to test the equivalence of groups a priori by assessing the number of health-related social media posts made by state legislators in our sample.