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Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

people-press.org

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Re: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

#31

Post by virmundi »

modeless wrote: post #11

If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools. It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.

Serious question: what is the benefit of Twitter? I never understood it. Since you’ve found a utility niche, would you expand on the statement?

Re: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

#32

Post by Bhilai »

buboard wrote: post #16

It's baffling why people think it's OK to retweet political stuff just because everyone else does it. If your profile says "data expert" or anything, why then do i get political propaganda when i follow you? At least have the decency to add "and political commentator" to your profile

You always have the option to unfollow or mute certain keywords.

Re: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

#34

Post by wil421 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #20
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's 97% of political tweets from US adults that mentioned national politics from June 10, 2018, through June 9, 2019 , not 97% of all political tweets (many of which are on behalf of organizations).

And was it only american politics? We outside often wonder how often tweets about our politics come from american accounts.

We inside wonder how many of the political tweets or memes being shared are from Eastern Europe troll farms. I recently read about a Polish troll farm running “Blue lives matter” groups. The purpose was profit not propaganda like the Russian farms.

Re: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

#35

Post by modeless »

virmundi wrote: post #31
modeless wrote: post #11

If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools. It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.

Serious question: what is the benefit of Twitter? I never understood it. Since you’ve found a utility niche, would you expand on the statement?

Similar to Hacker News for me: interesting tech articles and discussions, but with a different feel. I follow a bunch of graphics programmers and machine learning researchers. There's a lively community with a bunch of famous people participating as well as lesser known people who are really good in certain niches.

Particularly in machine learning it seems like thousands of papers are published every week, impossible to sort through. I find that the few I see people talking about on Twitter are the most interesting and worthy of attention.

Here's a list I made a while ago of the machine learning people I follow: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/b6dwrd/d_b...

Re: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

#36

Post by tozeur »

sandworm101 wrote: post #22
pixelmonkey wrote: post #19

See the 1% rule of the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) “... only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.” This is why “social listening” companies (which often amount to “Twitter listening” companies) present a very warped picture of reality when they try to extrapolate general consumer interests from the content…

If twitter is bad now, imagine the horror if the silent 99 start speaking up. 1% is more than enough.

That’s assuming the rest have the same behaviors as the 1%, which they inherently do not.

Re: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics

#38

Post by throw_m239339 »

virmundi wrote: post #31
modeless wrote: post #11

If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools. It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.

Serious question: what is the benefit of Twitter? I never understood it. Since you’ve found a utility niche, would you expand on the statement?

Marketing, It's great for brands or anybody that has something to sell (a book, a product, an idea,...).

It kind of replaced RSS for many people, expect it's a centralised tool.

Unfortunately "journalists" use it way too often to make up news out of nothing, gather random photos/videos without fact checking and spread rumors and falsehoods as truth. Something like the Covington Catholic school fiasco heavily relayed by the media, based on a footage where people saw what they wanted to see, would have never happened without the viral aspect of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter ended up banning the person that spread it, but none of the Twitter verified people that called for the murder of school students.

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