"...Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters. And these most active tweeters are much more likely than others to say they post about political issues. Fully 69% of the top 10% most prolific tweeters say they have tweeted about politics, compared with 39% of Twitter users generally. And 42% say they have tweeted about politics in the last 30 days, compared with just 13% of other users.
The Twitter platform provides multiple ways to post and share content, but the top 10% of tweeters are more likely to report using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf: 25% of highly prolific tweeters have done so, compared with only 15% of Twitter users in the bottom 90%...."
I find the second portion, using automatic methods to post tweets on their behalf, is quite alarming. The most prolific tweeters are also more likely to be using spam bots, possibly using spam bots to tweet about political issues.
Meh. Flipped another way, "90% of people in the US with twitter accounts don't post much if ever, and that long tail makes up 20% of twitter's US content"
Sounds about right, and not very alarming. Unless you're on twitter's engagement team, heh.
> using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf
This is so vague that it includes effectively all integrations with anything. Setting instagram to post to your twitter feed, for example. Spam is a possibility, but also just general scheduled posting, which seems fine. I expect the reality of that statistic to be very boring.
I imagine there's some use of tools like Hootsuite (allows you to schedule tweets) in there as well.
I remember Guy Kawasaki doing a post years ago that was effectively an FAQ on his use of twitter. People would moan at him for posting the same tweet multiple times over the course of a day, which turned out to be on a schedule, but he actually had a fairly good reason. Tweets last forever (ish - unless deleted or twitter goes under) but are also kind of ephemeral in the sense that they just flit by in your stream, so you miss a lot if you only check in every so often. He wanted to increase the chances that people would see his updates, and deal with the fact that his followers were spread across timezones.
I'd like to see a study which compares the average sentiment of a user's Tweets to the amount of Tweets that user has published in their lifetime.
From my casual observations I've seen a direct correlation between amount of lifetime Tweets a user has and the likelihood of them consistently Tweeting angry or hateful messages.
I’m not sure if # of tweets, which isn’t even equivalent to account age, is the appropriate figure here. Followers would be far more meaningful.
I don’t check # of tweets and therefore can’t judge your observation. But lookin at some top tweets and users, their content seems to invariably be more nuanced and civil than replies to them, which are mostly from frothing-at-the-mouth dickheads with no followers.
1. It has long been argued that Twitter has a liberal bias. This data proves it, with 60% of the users leaning left.
2. While the cause of #1 hasn't been established, it is likely that moderators and policy makers in Twitter live in left leaning cities in the US, with admittedly left leaning political views. These folks tend to favor one side in the their censorship.
3. If one considers the fact that 80% of the content is generated by 10%, and the politics of that 10% further skews left, one can see why Twitter looks like a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.
> a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.
Meh, it's all relative. I'm not exactly on the left and while the left echo chamber may seem uninviting, the right-wing echo chamber (cough cough gab cough cough) somehow manages to be a lot worse.
Agreed, although the right-wing echo chamber is rightly marginalized (in the literal sense of the word), while the far-left are running newsrooms, universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc. I don't think the far-left should be pushed quite as far to the margins as the far-right, but not putting them so squarely in positions of massive influence would be a good start.
> the far-left are running newsrooms, universities, associations, corporations, public education, etc.
Perhaps, but elite opinions in those sorts of highly-developed, urban institutions have been dominated by the "left" side of the political spectrum since we've had a recognizable left-right (or 'progressive-conservative') split. Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims left, there's nothing new under the sun. Of course many people think that today's left is too radical for its own good, but I wouldn't know how to even start to counter that tendency - and, again, you could say similar things about radicalism on the right - I remember what the Tea Party grassroots movement was like in the early 2000s, and there was nothing like the total craziness we see today!
I'm not sure if you missed my distinction between far-left and moderate-left or if I'm misunderstanding something about your response. I agree that these institutions have long been left-of-center, but they used to be liberal (in the sense that they favored things like free speech and heterodoxy and opposed things like discrimination based on immutable characteristics). I object to the vehemently illiberal wing of the left (and right, but as previously mentioned, apart from the anomaly that is the presidency, the illiberal right is largely marginalized).
You should read the 7th (2013) edition of Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff.
It's a little pricy (it's a textbook) for a used copy on Amazon at the moment, but I watched the listings for a while and managed to pick up two copies for less than $31 a piece this winter. Not perfect, but it's pretty accessible and systematic.
My point is that the parent might enjoy reading a fairly short, broad, systematic, accessible introductory textbook informed by ~50 years of studying power in America more than they might enjoy me telling them what to think.
I've completely lost track of politics at this point. When I think "far left" I think of things like communism, socialism, etc. Something that basically doesn't exist in American politics. Sure, we have a segment of the commentariat accusing the left of being socialist, but I don't see anyone on the left advocating for actual socialism, just "social democracy" a la western Europe.
I would love to know what supposedly counts as far left now. We've shifted the overton window so far that I'm really lost.
In politics, what you "advocate for" can (sadly) be less relevant than how you define yourself, and what you present yourself as. And there absolutely are people and social movements on the U.S. left who are explicitly self-defining as "socialist". This used to be beyond the pale, and I can very much find it understandable that some people are genuinely scared at seeing it happen, at least as much as I am by the seemingly-meteoric rise of the authoritarian, sexist-chauvinist, anti-Semitic etc. "alt-right" in the other side of the political spectrum.
Yeah, I'm not sure that "far left" is the appropriate term, but I wanted to communicate "people to the left of moderate liberals". I'm thinking people whose "egalitarian" vision demands segregation and treatment according to a strict hierarchy of immutable characteristics. People who use terms like "nazi" and "white supremacist" to refer to liberals and anyone right thereof. Not sure what the proper term is for this group.
Yeah no idea. Personally I prefer to reserve nazi and white supremacist labels for those who actually are. And beyond that I try to avoid labels. Getting fairly tired of the whole thing, really. My friends who tend towards more typical conservative views view me as very liberal. My liberal friends view me as conservative. Ha! Turns out I'm both, depending on what issue we're talking about.
We paint with very broad brushes these days, mostly to win arguments I think. Hard to say who is really at fault at this point, but I think in America our politics are just going to get nastier until some other country grows a sack big enough to attack us again.
This notion that gab is what Twitter would look like if it didn't deplatform anyone who isn't left of center, is misleading.
Many normal, peace loving, non bigoted folks simply do not agree with Twitteratti on a plethora of issues, but that needn't make them evil, and banning them is not helpful
If you drive away normal centrist folks to gab, it is worsening public discourse, not to mention, Twitter's bottom line. One can agree to disagree without bans and elaborate shaming rituals.
What portion of the delta in republican/democrat identification do you think might be attributable to the much more significant skew between the age of Twitter users and the general population?
This data suggests that, on Twitter:
18-29 are overrepresented by 8%
30-49 are overrepresented by 11%
50-64 are underrepresented by 7%
65+ are underrepresented by 12%
identified democrats overrepresented by 5%
identified republicans underrepresented by 6%
A 2016 Pew report (https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2016-party-identific...) suggested the partisan affiliation deltas per age group (sorry--there's probably a better dataset to use out there: the age ranges don't quite align, and this is just registered voters) broke out like:
1. This article doesn't say that Twitter (the company) has a liberal bias. It says that Twitter users lean left.
2. The article says absolutely nothing about this, and you haven't provided any evidence. This is pure conjecture.
3. Twitter users aren't forced to follow anyone in particular. There are plenty of timelines filled with conversations that look and sound like right wing "echo chambers", centrist "echo chambers", etc.
Plus/minus 5% is really just a marginal difference from the general population. It’s almost impressive in a way, and with just a bit of the motivated reasoning you so daftly employ in #2 and #3, I would argue it must be the result of some sort of intervention in the opposite direction of what you’re implying.
By calling my reasoning "daft", and by implying interventionism, many would assume a text book ad hominem. But I'm ok with a jab - if we all get overly sensitive, and remove emotions from discourse, we're just denying our humanity.
As for your counter points on my #2, #3, I've made it clear that it's "likely" for people to censor along the lines of their politics/options. I don't believe that to be unreasonable, especially when the censors aren't subject to any laws/regulations.
And if there's ANY doubt in actual leftist bent inside Twitter, the company, here [1] is their CEO admitting to conservative employees being terrified to speak their mind.
I think the parent means "so deftly employ" rather than "daftly". I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, if the CEO of the company thinks conservative staff would be afraid to speak that seems quite solid to me (I'm liberal, but not leftist, and would also be afraid to work at Twitter).
> Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users.
One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way communication channel.
If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly, but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days, many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.
Twitter is the literal opposite of community-building, like usenet used to be.
Not that I'm nostalgic, usenet simply could not scale to the number of users we see online today.
I think Reddit is closer to usenet in its DNA, but usenet groups were TINY compared even the smallest popular subreddits. reddit isn't perfect by any means, no one has solved the scalability issue, but if it weren't for mods, reddit would be even worse than it is right now.
I would disagree. It is community building in a different construct. There is no /r/X or group structure built in. I am only Twitter because I design board games. I only interact with board game community accounts and posts. The community is diverse, varied and thriving. If I was trying to get 100K followers to argue about politics maybe I'd have a bad time. I'm just trying to say that there is a lot of community building but it is self-directed not controlled by the platform.
>> It is community building in a different construct
Yeah that's a good point, but it is more of a broadcast mechanism, isn't it? Like, I follow people I'm interested in on twitter like Adam Savage and Simone Giertz. But they would never reply to a post to them b/c they get flooded by their legions of followers.
Yes and no. There are several medium sized publishers that run their own accounts and are active participants in the conversations. It is a slightly different structure because you can meet and talk with them at conventions too but in the end it is a marketing tool to build their audience. Some of the most famous game designers in the world actively communicate with other members all the time. There are also sub-communities of just people who design games or people who follow popular game reviewers, etc. I was just trying to make the point that there are some communities on Twitter but they are self organizing. There are sites like boardgamegeek that are popular too but some of the reddit communities have weird rules like not being able to post that you have a new game coming out.
Twitter is hands down my favorite social media platform, I really enjoy how I can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests. It is also a great way to share my own content and interact with the people that are interested in it. There is also the unspoken benefit that unfollowing someone does not have the same social impact as unfriending someone on Facebook.
(Active Twitter user for 10 years, 90k Tweets and a few thousand followers)
You can unfollow people on Facebook without unfriending them. Works wonders for people who you have a relationship with, but don't necessarily need to see their stream of posts.
There's also a new 'snooze' feature, where you can 'snooze' a person for 30 days.
Interesting that managing friendships and relationships with these tools feels an awful lot like....work does. Everything compartmentalized, specific functions to deal with people down stream..
>I can curate a stream of content that is almost always relevant to my interests
How much work did that take you?
I've tried to do what you describe.... but time and again I grow tired scrolling through hordes of "I really followed this person or thing to hear about this content but now they're tweeting about X" and found I constantly had to manage it. It was to the point that I just would rather keep bookmarks as websites are better at staying focused than most twitter accounts.
In a way, the management of my feed is a never ending game. Typically the problem I see is that people are too reluctant to unfollow/ follow other accounts.
How do you do it? Lets say I follow someone that talks about games, and I love their insights posts on that. But 50% of their posts are political which I have no interest in. Are posts tagged in a way that I can avoid that topic.
Not a twitter user currently. Tried it a few years ago and that was the problem I had.
> Members of the top 10% of tweeters also have distinct attitudes, behaviors and personal characteristics compared with those who use the platform less often. These prolific tweeters are more likely to be women: 65% are, compared with 48% of the bottom 90% of tweeters.
I find this fascinating. If the data are correct, Twitter's most valuable users (the ones who write all the Tweets) are overwhelmingly (65%) women, and even among the less active "lurkers" women make up just a little less than half. And yet, ask any woman who's active on Twitter to tell you about her experience with it, and you'll get a hair-raising catalog of stories of threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness -- all of which Twitter has shown next to zero interest in curbing.
It requires some seriously blinkered management to decide it's not important for your service to provide at least a minimally welcoming experience for its core audience.
I invite everyone to create a female persona on twitter and interact with your usual communities for a month.
You will likely get the same “with all due respect...” responses as usual, but a surprising number of them will manage to meander their way, within just 280 chars, to “...and therefore you need a good rape.”
Maybe this should finally clue you in that online harassment has always been a pass time for and by women. ED, Kiwifarms, do you really think it's mostly men who spend all that time concerned with social warfare, gossiping and reputational damage?
The default on the internet is male, and the same goes for anons, because we expect women to make themselves noticable. When they don't, we assume they are men. But clearly social media is mainly for and by women. Maybe they ought to own up to that.
I have never seen more drama and abuse as in female dominated groups. Men have an argument, fight, and then go have a beer. Women will waffle and try to appear the reasonable party, but only so they can stick the knife in the back later, and they rarely forgive. This is generally true, but any woman who does not fight this way is a treasure who you can invite into groups of men without changing the dynamic permanently.
> ED, Kiwifarms, do you really think it's mostly men who spend all that time concerned with social warfare, gossiping and reputational damage?
Yes, actually I really do think so. Never mind ED or Kiwifarms, what about B1FF and the Meow Wars? Internet trolling and flame-baiting very much dates back to the 1980s, when the Internet was truly a male domain; Twitter and Tumblr have simply made it mainstream. At most, we could say that some women with remarkably antisocial tendencies may have joined the fray with gusto, but I just don't buy the claim that they even account for anything close to a majority of that, erm, userbase.
> ask any woman who's active on Twitter to tell you about her experience with it, and you'll get a hair-raising catalog of stories of threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness
I do know several women who are moderately active on twitter and have not had experiences like this. Most of the people I know on twitter are in the accessibility community, K12 education, or higher education. Perhaps these spaces do not have the same behaviors that you describe? It’s possible that these areas are overwhelmingly female and that the gender balance changes the dynamic.
I've seen the trend with some news outlets to report "what people are saying" and by that, reference a bunch of tweets about the topic. Which is lazy reporting.
But confirmed by this report, Twitter isn't the general public. Twitter is incredibly progressive and hotly political.
If Twitter would have been the one voting, Hillary would have been voted into office. But they weren't, and there was a whole segment of the country ignored, that probably isn't on Twitter. And it's no wonder that half the tech sphere was "stunned" was Trump was able to wiggle his way into office.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadThe Twitter platform provides multiple ways to post and share content, but the top 10% of tweeters are more likely to report using automated methods that allow others to post tweets on their behalf: 25% of highly prolific tweeters have done so, compared with only 15% of Twitter users in the bottom 90%...."
I find the second portion, using automatic methods to post tweets on their behalf, is quite alarming. The most prolific tweeters are also more likely to be using spam bots, possibly using spam bots to tweet about political issues.
" In fact, this analysis estimates that the top 10% of tweeters are responsible for 80% of the tweets created by all U.S. adults on Twitter."
Sounds about right, and not very alarming. Unless you're on twitter's engagement team, heh.
This is so vague that it includes effectively all integrations with anything. Setting instagram to post to your twitter feed, for example. Spam is a possibility, but also just general scheduled posting, which seems fine. I expect the reality of that statistic to be very boring.
I remember Guy Kawasaki doing a post years ago that was effectively an FAQ on his use of twitter. People would moan at him for posting the same tweet multiple times over the course of a day, which turned out to be on a schedule, but he actually had a fairly good reason. Tweets last forever (ish - unless deleted or twitter goes under) but are also kind of ephemeral in the sense that they just flit by in your stream, so you miss a lot if you only check in every so often. He wanted to increase the chances that people would see his updates, and deal with the fact that his followers were spread across timezones.
From my casual observations I've seen a direct correlation between amount of lifetime Tweets a user has and the likelihood of them consistently Tweeting angry or hateful messages.
I don’t check # of tweets and therefore can’t judge your observation. But lookin at some top tweets and users, their content seems to invariably be more nuanced and civil than replies to them, which are mostly from frothing-at-the-mouth dickheads with no followers.
1. It has long been argued that Twitter has a liberal bias. This data proves it, with 60% of the users leaning left.
2. While the cause of #1 hasn't been established, it is likely that moderators and policy makers in Twitter live in left leaning cities in the US, with admittedly left leaning political views. These folks tend to favor one side in the their censorship.
3. If one considers the fact that 80% of the content is generated by 10%, and the politics of that 10% further skews left, one can see why Twitter looks like a left echo chamber, uninviting to most centrist and right leaning folks.
Meh, it's all relative. I'm not exactly on the left and while the left echo chamber may seem uninviting, the right-wing echo chamber (cough cough gab cough cough) somehow manages to be a lot worse.
Perhaps, but elite opinions in those sorts of highly-developed, urban institutions have been dominated by the "left" side of the political spectrum since we've had a recognizable left-right (or 'progressive-conservative') split. Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims left, there's nothing new under the sun. Of course many people think that today's left is too radical for its own good, but I wouldn't know how to even start to counter that tendency - and, again, you could say similar things about radicalism on the right - I remember what the Tea Party grassroots movement was like in the early 2000s, and there was nothing like the total craziness we see today!
It's a little pricy (it's a textbook) for a used copy on Amazon at the moment, but I watched the listings for a while and managed to pick up two copies for less than $31 a piece this winter. Not perfect, but it's pretty accessible and systematic.
I would love to know what supposedly counts as far left now. We've shifted the overton window so far that I'm really lost.
We paint with very broad brushes these days, mostly to win arguments I think. Hard to say who is really at fault at this point, but I think in America our politics are just going to get nastier until some other country grows a sack big enough to attack us again.
Many normal, peace loving, non bigoted folks simply do not agree with Twitteratti on a plethora of issues, but that needn't make them evil, and banning them is not helpful
If you drive away normal centrist folks to gab, it is worsening public discourse, not to mention, Twitter's bottom line. One can agree to disagree without bans and elaborate shaming rituals.
This data suggests that, on Twitter:
18-29 are overrepresented by 8%
30-49 are overrepresented by 11%
50-64 are underrepresented by 7%
65+ are underrepresented by 12%
identified democrats overrepresented by 5%
identified republicans underrepresented by 6%
A 2016 Pew report (https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2016-party-identific...) suggested the partisan affiliation deltas per age group (sorry--there's probably a better dataset to use out there: the age ranges don't quite align, and this is just registered voters) broke out like:
18-35: +12% democrat
36-51: +6% democrat
52-70: +2% democrat
71-88: +8% republican
1. This article doesn't say that Twitter (the company) has a liberal bias. It says that Twitter users lean left.
2. The article says absolutely nothing about this, and you haven't provided any evidence. This is pure conjecture.
3. Twitter users aren't forced to follow anyone in particular. There are plenty of timelines filled with conversations that look and sound like right wing "echo chambers", centrist "echo chambers", etc.
As for your counter points on my #2, #3, I've made it clear that it's "likely" for people to censor along the lines of their politics/options. I don't believe that to be unreasonable, especially when the censors aren't subject to any laws/regulations.
And if there's ANY doubt in actual leftist bent inside Twitter, the company, here [1] is their CEO admitting to conservative employees being terrified to speak their mind.
[1]: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/406927-twitter-ceo-jac...
One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way communication channel.
If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly, but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days, many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.
Not that I'm nostalgic, usenet simply could not scale to the number of users we see online today.
I think Reddit is closer to usenet in its DNA, but usenet groups were TINY compared even the smallest popular subreddits. reddit isn't perfect by any means, no one has solved the scalability issue, but if it weren't for mods, reddit would be even worse than it is right now.
Yeah that's a good point, but it is more of a broadcast mechanism, isn't it? Like, I follow people I'm interested in on twitter like Adam Savage and Simone Giertz. But they would never reply to a post to them b/c they get flooded by their legions of followers.
It's not just dumb tweeting into the void, Twitter basically makes you dumb in order to avoid tweeting into the void.
(Active Twitter user for 10 years, 90k Tweets and a few thousand followers)
Interesting that managing friendships and relationships with these tools feels an awful lot like....work does. Everything compartmentalized, specific functions to deal with people down stream..
How much work did that take you?
I've tried to do what you describe.... but time and again I grow tired scrolling through hordes of "I really followed this person or thing to hear about this content but now they're tweeting about X" and found I constantly had to manage it. It was to the point that I just would rather keep bookmarks as websites are better at staying focused than most twitter accounts.
In a way, the management of my feed is a never ending game. Typically the problem I see is that people are too reluctant to unfollow/ follow other accounts.
Not a twitter user currently. Tried it a few years ago and that was the problem I had.
I find this fascinating. If the data are correct, Twitter's most valuable users (the ones who write all the Tweets) are overwhelmingly (65%) women, and even among the less active "lurkers" women make up just a little less than half. And yet, ask any woman who's active on Twitter to tell you about her experience with it, and you'll get a hair-raising catalog of stories of threats, abuse, and general unpleasantness -- all of which Twitter has shown next to zero interest in curbing.
It requires some seriously blinkered management to decide it's not important for your service to provide at least a minimally welcoming experience for its core audience.
You will likely get the same “with all due respect...” responses as usual, but a surprising number of them will manage to meander their way, within just 280 chars, to “...and therefore you need a good rape.”
The default on the internet is male, and the same goes for anons, because we expect women to make themselves noticable. When they don't, we assume they are men. But clearly social media is mainly for and by women. Maybe they ought to own up to that.
I have never seen more drama and abuse as in female dominated groups. Men have an argument, fight, and then go have a beer. Women will waffle and try to appear the reasonable party, but only so they can stick the knife in the back later, and they rarely forgive. This is generally true, but any woman who does not fight this way is a treasure who you can invite into groups of men without changing the dynamic permanently.
Yes, actually I really do think so. Never mind ED or Kiwifarms, what about B1FF and the Meow Wars? Internet trolling and flame-baiting very much dates back to the 1980s, when the Internet was truly a male domain; Twitter and Tumblr have simply made it mainstream. At most, we could say that some women with remarkably antisocial tendencies may have joined the fray with gusto, but I just don't buy the claim that they even account for anything close to a majority of that, erm, userbase.
I do know several women who are moderately active on twitter and have not had experiences like this. Most of the people I know on twitter are in the accessibility community, K12 education, or higher education. Perhaps these spaces do not have the same behaviors that you describe? It’s possible that these areas are overwhelmingly female and that the gender balance changes the dynamic.
But confirmed by this report, Twitter isn't the general public. Twitter is incredibly progressive and hotly political.
If Twitter would have been the one voting, Hillary would have been voted into office. But they weren't, and there was a whole segment of the country ignored, that probably isn't on Twitter. And it's no wonder that half the tech sphere was "stunned" was Trump was able to wiggle his way into office.