Is Twitter playing favorites with Dems?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. | When people sign up for Twitter, the popular social-networking site presents a list of suggested users to follow, driving significant traffic to sports figures, celebrities, politicians and other prominent posters.

In California, the list has attracted the attention of political watchdogs because it apparently favors Democrats over Republicans in next year’s race for governor. That raises questions about whether Twitter should change its policy at a time when the site is catching on as a popular recruiting tool for candidates.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is on the suggested-user list and has 1.2 million followers. His likely opponent for the Democratic nomination, Attorney General Jerry Brown, has 960,000 followers, even though he is not a declared candidate and has posted the fewest Tweets of all the gubernatorial hopefuls.

None of the three Republican candidates is on the list, and all have fewer than 5,000 followers.

“It’s a dumb move,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, an independent, nonpartisan think tank in Los Angeles. “Somebody should have been thinking that it’s pretty obvious you don’t put just the Democrats on it.”

Such apparent favoritism does not violate any California campaign regulations, but it has caught the attention of the state’s watchdog agency. The California Fair Political Practices Commission has formed a committee to examine how campaigns intersect with social media and to determine whether additional regulations are necessary.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a March posting on his blog that he and a handful of other company employees make the final choice about who will be featured, a list that has grown to about 500 people.

He compared it to “your local bookstore’s staff picks,” a benign way of introducing new authors.

New users are linked automatically to 20 people they might want to follow, selected at random from the list of 500. They can reject or include as many from the master list as they like.

In an e-mail to the Associated Press, Twitter Inc. spokeswoman Jenna Sampson said the suggested-user list is based on users “who show that they provide value by posting often and engaging with their followers.” It includes some nationally known Republicans, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. John McCain and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The company is updating its features, which could lead to a change in the list, she said.

Among the issues the Fair Political Practices Commission will examine during next year’s hearings is whether candidates should be required to disclose preferential social-network listings as in-kind contributions. No decisions are expected until 2011, after next year’s elections.