‘Chirrup’

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Written by Mikaprok

Self representation

Amid another wave of Sinophobia in Southeast Asia, let’s talk a little about social networks and related insights.

An increasing amount of material is accumulating about the sociology of social networks, while online-sociology is not widely covered in Russia, and a pertinent pretext to talk about it is easy to be found. For example, there is a new study on the Twitter community, which has recently been released by Pew Research.

It is believed that in the United States, Twitter is still the preeminent public political forum, by a significant margin. In fact, this is an artificially created leader which faces no competition in terms of the quantity and quality of its contributors.

In the Russian Federation, Twitter never acquired the same popularity and evolutionarily failed to catch up other home-grown literary-centric platforms. There are their own stars there, including political ones. Nonetheless, their prominence and penetration cannot compare with those American platforms which have global reach.

Going back to the Pew study, it provides some highly significant details about Twitter users :

• 22% of American adults have a Twitter profile. This is a remarkable figure, particularly considering that the platform is not technically adapted for media-stuffing.
• The average microblogger on Twitter differs significantly from the average social media user, by several criteria. For example, from a Facebook user. Users tend to be male, between 25 and 45 years old and well-educated (there is a record number of verified accounts of people with more than one degree). Given these first tendencies, it is not surprising that they also tend to be wealthier, and to travel several times more often than their peers. They are also less likely to be immigrants to their country of residence, and to be younger than the average citizen of their country.
• The Pareto rule on Twitter is strongly in evidence; 10% of users are responsible for 80% of the content. This number is HUGE. In fact, Twitter is nothing but their show.
• Twitter is primarily a vehicle for political expression (68% of the tweets of the “10 percenters” have a political theme)
• In terms of the racial profile of the user base, Twitter is predominantly used by white Americans (60%), although use by Hispanics has been growing in recent years.
• There are almost twice as many self-declared “Democrats” as there are “Republicans”. In real life, according to official data, the ratio is 52 to 43 in favour of the former.
• The prolific “10 percenters” post an average of 138 tweets per month, and every third tweet is a link to additional material outside the platform.
• In the North American segment of the Twittersphere, that is, in Mexico, USA, Canada, users are still growing by almost 11% per year – a significant yearly increase.

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In addition to the study, we need to add that Twitter is also a prominent advertising platform, although this is less true in the Russian Federation and a number of European countries, except for Ireland and the UK. Revenues from Twitter have been increasing by 18% per year. Last year they increased by as much as 25% (we need to check this figure).

Given the dominance of a small number of users, Twitter is the preserve of a fairly narrow group of authors who aggressively promote a fairly narrow range of opinions almost without any discussions. This is a showcase of intellectual life in less than a couple hundred symbols :-)

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Let us add a few important general notes.

First, more than 20% of those tweets that are not the product of the prolific 10% are actually spam.

Second, according to research conducted by the Nielsen Group, Twitter is also plagued by a vast army of bots. They estimate that, at any specific time, approximately 35 – 40% of accounts are not associated with an actual human being and were created to increase the numbers of followers.

For example, here’s what some famous accounts look like according to Signal:

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It is clear that the real number of subscribers is even less.

It is reported that 330 million people regularly use the platform (as of 2018), but given the problem with bots, it is likely therefore that the real number of subscribers is probably far fewer than the nominal figure.

And how much daily Twitter traffic originates in the US? The figure is disputed, but it can be estimated using indirect methods. One way is to assess how many people repost to other social networks FROM Twitter every day. With regard to reposts to Facebook, for the period February – April this year, this amounted to….. only 8.5 million people.

The total number of inhabitants of a cosy world dictating public opinion and quoted in the media is significantly less than it seems to be. However, nobody cares.

That is, it is clear that only a relatively small number of people – far fewer than the inflated estimates of users – are responsible for making the greatest noise on Twitter, thus creating the false impression of strong ideological support for some policies.

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