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How can you say twitter isn’t real? Is Trump not a felon? Does he not have a 500 million judgement against himself? Did the respectable Ivy League people all pretend a mentally ill man was the nations best female swimmer? It almost seems normal that the Harvard President got fired because on the other side of the world a bunch of Jews at a music festival got raided and their women raped and Harvard basically took the side of the rapists.
It seems like the “it’s just someone on the internet” actually has power in the real institutional world. It seems to me like the craziest things I could imagine in 2005 in the darkerst of the internet are now occurring in real life.
I don't think it's clear that the causation of these issues all flow in the direction you suggest. Isn't it more likely to you that twitter (a large, lowest common denominator website) users' beliefs about these popular (the president, harvard, and the olympics) issues are reflective of the real-life happenings?
In my personal opinion (not OP), the actual problem with Twitter (and maybe TikTok soon) is that journalists mine Twitter for scandals and things to write about instead of doing legwork to find things that people actually care about. Twitter activists realized this feedback loop, and deliberately exploited it. It was easy for Twitter activists, and short-term beneficial for journalists on the individual level, too. They could write a story saying "people are upset about __" or "people are saying " in a matter of minutes instead of whatever longer process they normally would follow of dredging up something newsworthy or interesting.
In that sense, Twitter as viewed through the media was not at all representative. And with algorithms in play, I can't say for sure if it's generally representative either. Plus, you have to talk actual market penetration. The actual userbase in the US isn't very large. It's a small enough percentage of the population that distortion can occur.
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