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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I don't believe that chart proves as much as you think it does. If we assume for the sake of argument that every single one of those 70 million north American accounts corresponds to a real live flesh and blood person. IE that the number of bots, corporate PR accounts, and users operating multiple accounts on Twitter is 0. That works out to a little under 1 in 5 people, or around 18% of the combined population of the US and Canada. In contrast creationists are estimated to be around 30% of the population. How many creationists do you know?

Of course thing is that while the number of bots on Twitter is in dispute, we know for a fact that that a substantial portion of Twitter accounts are official corporate PR, and that a lot of people have multiple accounts so that estimate of 1 in 5 people or 18% of the population is almost certainly overgenerous.

I was specifically rebutting the " I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly." claim. Obviously a MAU chart proves nothing about 'wellspring of culture', as the creationist example, or something like 'red tribe', 'christians', 'reality tv fans', 'old people' - all of which have large populations yet aren't culturally dominant - nicely shows.

and I'm pointing out that it's not much of a rebuttal, for instance that 18% of the population (if we're feeling overgenerous) might be concentrated in a specific geographic area. Likewise "cultural dominance" is a difficult measure. IE Gamergate is really big deal amongst a certain subset of the extremely online left, and has been characterized by a number of different users here as "the most culturally significant event of the last two decades" but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the general population knew or cared anything about it. Publishers sleeping with and/or buying off reviewers oh you sweet summer child this has been the norm since the 19th century.

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