I'm going to assume that you are confused by the linked chart and are not being intentionally obtuse.
The chart displays a breakdown of total employee contributions to the two political parties. As you can see, the "% to democrats" column contains 95%+ for the last 4 years. It would be safe to assume that this metric is a reasonable proxy for Twitter staff's political leanings.
Fair enough that I misread the chart, but are we sure that those contributions are evenly distributed throughout the employee population and not, for example, mostly from executives? I can't tell where this data is sourced from.
>It would be safe to assume that this metric is a reasonable proxy for Twitter staff's political leanings.
No it wouldn't be because it doesn't way what percent of employees donate at all. I assume the percentage is pretty low because it's <$200,000 going to Democrats from the entire company.
Ignoring that we have no idea where the data ultimately comes from (or are private contributions public in the US?) it is highly misleading by omission.
If we look at the linked page [1] we see that 2014 and 2016 much higher fractions went to the Republicans (31% in 2016 and 11% in 2014) with the total contributions varying wildly from year to year, but the chart was cut to show single-digit values only.
As part of the donating to a political campaign, that information is required to ensure it is a real person donating, prevent employees from prohibited companies from donating (e.g. federal contractors have a conflict of interest) and preventing or recording coercion from management to donate a particular way.
> For each contribution that exceeds $200, either by itself or when added to the contributor’s previous contributions made during the same calendar year, records must identify that contribution by:
Amount;
Date of receipt; and
Contributor’s full name and mailing address, occupation and employer.
If a person has already contributed an aggregate amount of over $200 during a calendar year, each subsequent contribution, regardless of amount, must be identified in the same way.
Please note that contributions to authorized committees are aggregated on a calendar-year basis for recordkeeping purposes, but are aggregated on a per-election basis for purposes of monitoring contribution limits, and on an election-cycle basis for reporting purposes.
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And thus open secrets is getting the aggregate data that and releasing that.
Fun fact : you can just put unemployed and you don't have to list your employer. Most tech people I know are so paranoid about personal information that they would most likely go that route.