For what it's worth, I would like to remind everyone about the true nature of Twitter:
Of the most followed accounts, two out of 50 belong to political actors of any kind. That's about 7% of all followers for these accounts. Other ways of looking at Twitter readership put politics at around 10% or so. The other 90% is music, news, sports, and a smattering of other topics.¹
This is not to say that political Twitter is of no consequence. It's only to say that everyone has their own Twitter, which they think of as "Twitter" even though it's unique to them. If you follow extreme political accounts, Twitter seems like the Wild West. If you follow normal people who are interested in politics, it seems like an OK platform for keeping up with things. And if you're part of the 90% that follows the Steelers or Rihanna or NASA, it's a platform that has nothing to do with politics at all.
Keep this in mind. Elon Musk is obviously obsessed with politics but his customers aren't. The future of Twitter depends on celebrities and musicians, not the left or the right.
¹Obviously this can change from week to week and also differs depending on who's doing the counting. Don't take the precise numbers too seriously.
NOTE: Each of these charts actually has only 24 Twitter accounts. That's because I was interested only in American political players, so I deleted two accounts belonging to the prime minister of India.
So that's not Rick Perry?
Not even Madea?
it's hard keeping up with the kids....
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Katie (sp?) Perry
Yeah I spent some time thinking "James" was probably "Bill James" until googling told me it's LeBron. Well, duh.
I'd certainly be painting Musk's column red. But Kevin makes an interesting point. I wonder if it ever occurred to the previous management to kick ALL the politicians off Twitter, and ban political tweets. It was never planned to be a place for serious conversations. It would have been worth losing 10% of the users to avoid all the controversies and hostility from politicians and political commentators.
You're doing a poor job of trying to convince yourself of a reality that changed, six weeks ago.
Once Musk purchased Twitter, all he's ever done is to try to make Twitter a political shithole.
Followers isn't a great measure of what actually happens on Twitter. Which accounts get the most daily engagement?
This. And the fact that Twitter is the assignment editor for the media, at least in the U.S.
The headline:
"Twitter is not left or right"
Should read
"Twitter is not right"
When NASA gets hacked and tweets kiddie porn will Mr. drum quit? No.
Because the best way to understand a data set is to examine its outliers.
I don't follow any of the top 50, I have no idea who 15 of them are at all, and I only have a vague impression of about half the rest.
In touch or out of touch?
Which kinda raises the question: if you're running an entertainment news website, why you would try so hard to make the kind of news ("Nazis! Our telephone lines are open for you!") that gets celebrities to boycott a business.
Unless for whatever reason you think boycotts make news (or give you personally a chance to make more billionaire pals) and what your business needs is more newsworthiness...
The perfect description of Elon Musk,
https://old.reddit.com/r/oddlyspecific/comments/z6vhy7/easily_the_most_accurate_description_of_grimes/
I would count news sites as political, because they report politics. This applies to Fox "News" especially, since it's a disinformation site.
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The Prime Minister of India? Huh?
He is obviously a politician and right wing to boot. And he is the most followed Twitterer in India.
Maybe the title is mostly expressing US parochialism.
You're right Azum. Every day 300 million Americans wake up wondering what happened in the political arena in India overnight while we were sleeping. All 300 million rush to their computers to see if Kevin has the latest Indian political news, and for the 4,782nd consecutive day, we are all disappointed to see that once again Kevin has let us down--no news of Indian politics.
I'm glad you pointed that out. I never realized how parochial Kevin is.
There's a clear distinction between "political actors" and "American political actors". You and Kevin would both do well to keep that distinction in mind.
Kevin I believe you are conflating two separate ideas. 1) the majority of Twitter is non political 2) for the subset of political accounts, Twitter seemingly exercised editorial preference for one party over the other.
Stated differently, would you be okay if Musk limited all the MSNBC personalities on Twitter, but supported the FOX equivalent folks, because "The real Twitter is not left or right."
What the charts actually show is that there is no distinction between "political" and "other". The only factor is "celebrity", whatever that is.
History (and Current Events) is written by the scribing class, who care far more about what happens to their people than to mass humanity.
In distant history this is very clear - eg complaints about how what we have written between say 300 and 900CE is primarily church history. But the exact same thing occurs in our time. For example discussions of the Soviet Union include disproportionate time (IMHO) to the bad treatments of their intellectuals (ie academics, journalists, artists) as compared to anyone else. Open a random discussion of the Soviet Union and you will see lots about which writers were put on trial/locked up, very little of which generals, or plants managers were treated this way...
This is not a moral issue, it's an *understanding* issue -- you can't understand how these societies worked, or why they persisted as long as they did, if the only part of the society you care about or look at is a reflection of your own extremely narrow and parochial concerns.
And this same blinkered parochialism is just as apparent when it comes to the discussions, by the appearing-smart professions, of our society and culture...
There's a clear distinction between "political actors" and "American political actors". You and Kevin would both do well to keep that distinction in mind.
Misplaced post. Please ignore.
Post raises a question that none of the reporting I've seen asks: how many people actually read twitter? Globally twitter has about 205 million daily users. That's about 2.5% of the global population. So, not very many people overall. Whatever that 2.5% of people use it for it sure seems like it's influence in real life isn't much. It's like AOL chat rooms back in the day before the internet. A fun little diversion for tech nerds but most people have only heard about it.
Ugh.
When the man pulling the strings is using the site to platform right-wing speech, it's all political, whether looking at cat videos on it or a company buying ad space on it.
We do not have our own Twitter. It's Musk's world and we're just twits in it.
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