Social Musk becomes largest shareholder of twitter

[FIMN]

It gave the different special interest groups within progressives a medium to align themselves and, more precisely, to align their outrage. Especially over selective video footage, which culminated in the George Floyd video.

Western culture began to abruptly change as soon as Twitter took off (around 2012). There was hardly such thing as a 'SJW' before then. The left wing mob weaponized Twitter. It became the highly effective medium for their outrage. I remember in 2015 when South Park aired their 19th season poking fun at the SJWs, who were still a rather new thing at the time.

Fair enough. To me this seems highly subjective and I don't think there's much empirical data to back up the assertion.

Culture "abruptly changes" at any and all times depending on your perspective. I think it was abruptly changing at any point of any decade you choose to look at. Not that social media has not had a big impact on all political and cultural groups - but the idea that its super accelerated one over any other and that is the driving force behind change to an entire subculture is a reach.

IMO.

 

[Bojka]

Fair enough. To me this seems highly subjective and I don't think there's much empirical data to back up the assertion.

Culture "abruptly changes" at any and all times depending on your perspective. I think it was abruptly changing at any point of any decade you choose to look at. Not that social media has not had a big impact on all political and cultural groups - but the idea that its super accelerated one over any other and that is the driving force behind change to an entire subculture is a reach.

IMO.

It's not a reach. Twitter users over the last 10 years have been disproportionately young and disproportionately urban (which also means disproportionately non-white). It has rather obviously been a more effective medium for the promotion of left wing views.

There are other variables that have contributed. iPhones and the general higher availability of video footage is one of them, but they are largely symbiotic with social media.

 

[Loiosh]

Fair enough. To me this seems highly subjective and I don't think there's much empirical data to back up the assertion.

Culture "abruptly changes" at any and all times depending on your perspective. I think it was abruptly changing at any point of any decade you choose to look at. Not that social media has not had a big impact on all political and cultural groups - but the idea that its super accelerated one over any other and that is the driving force behind change to an entire subculture is a reach.

IMO.

There's plenty of empirical data and it all shows that conservative voices dominate every platform.

@Jackie Blue could give you more detail.

 

[Super_Nintendo]

There's plenty of empirical data and it all shows that conservative voices dominate every platform.

@Jackie Blue could give you more detail.

F the data , anyone around in the last 7 years knows conservatives get banned, shadowbanned, censored, and deplatformed on all the biggest platforms...Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and the rest. Piss'em off badly and they'll go after your email accounts, web hosts, payment processors, and banks too, all in 24-48hrs like they're totally not in collusion or anything wink wink.

 

[Bojka]

There's plenty of empirical data and it all shows that conservative voices dominate every platform.

@Jackie Blue could give you more detail.

Ahhh yes. lol. I have seen some of that "data" and the mental gymnastics used to spin it in line with your argument.

Here is some data:

Of the Most Active Tweeters (who produce 92% of tweets):
- 69% are Democrat/lean Dem
- 26% are Republican/lean Rep
- Of these most active tweeters, Dem users tweeted twice as often as Rep users, so the skew in terms of volume of tweets is 84:16 or 5.25:1

In addition:
- Democrat Twitter users consider themselves more 'liberal' than Democrats within the general population. So Dem Twitter users are less moderate than Dems in general.
- The median Dem user has more followers and follows more accounts than the median Rep user

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/15/p...073KIHfeLL4AWe9qRvWabNMJxRBmB0oqp9c0AeNqLDqWx

 

[Mr Holmes]

There's plenty of empirical data and it all shows that conservative voices dominate every platform.

@Jackie Blue could give you more detail.

No way. Reddit for example down votes conservative opinions into oblivion. Twitter is also very slanted left.

 

[PEB]

A few new tidbits of information at least what could be happening. Last time Elon floated this idea in any meaningful way was during a window where he could sell Tesla shares in that time he sold I believe 8 billion or more worth. This time around his executive window opening up again and his I am buying out Twitter opened up again many believe this is the reason why he is talking about acquiring Twitter so reaction to his sales are less dramatic as he could say I am loading up to buy Twitter. Instead of hearing from everyone that Tesla failing he jumping off the ship. The other is he let it drop again that the deal may not go through if his financing of the deal from banks does not go through giving he a new potential way out of the deal by claiming in the courts he could not fund the deal not because he all he wanted was out of the deal now he can claim I cannot fund the deal. This likely why Twitter not seeking his return into the talks.

 

[Diogenes of Sinope]

I love how all of this is making Elon malders lose their minds.
who cares one way or another. none of you use Twitter anyway lol

 

[Sano]

Ahhh yes. lol. I have seen some of that "data" and the mental gymnastics used to spin it in line with your argument.

Here is some data:

Of the Most Active Tweeters (who produce 92% of tweets):
- 69% are Democrat/lean Dem
- 26% are Republican/lean Rep
- Of these most active tweeters, Dem users tweeted twice as often as Rep users, so the skew in terms of volume of tweets is 84:16 or 5.25:1

In addition:
- Democrat Twitter users consider themselves more 'liberal' than Democrats within the general population. So Dem Twitter users are less moderate than Dems in general.
- The median Dem user has more followers and follows more accounts than the median Rep user

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/15/p...073KIHfeLL4AWe9qRvWabNMJxRBmB0oqp9c0AeNqLDqWx

Yes, there are more democrat users on twitter that produce a greater volume of tweets, in part because that demographic is younger and more active, but that doesn't tell us anything about reach or engagement. You left something very important out from the pew research study that was used in the article:

"Despite these substantive differences in tweet volume, the top 10% most active Democrats and Republicans are comparable in terms of the number of accounts they follow (580 vs. 582), the number of accounts who follow them (342 vs. 354) and the number of tweets they favorite in a typical month."
https://www.pewresearch.org/politic...-democrats-and-republicans-behave-on-twitter/

So, despite democrat users being more active, the most active accounts on both sides of the political spectrum have a similar audience. More importantly, conservative and right leaning tweets have more engagement and are heavily favoured by the algorithm. Several studies have been done on this both internally and externally, and they all confirm that right wing and conservative content has greater amplification and reach on twitter:

"Twitter users, a fine-grained analysis of political parties in seven countries, and 6.2 million news articles shared in the United States, this study carries out the most comprehensive audit of an algorithmic recommender system and its effects on political content. Results unveil that the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com...hmic-Amplification-of-Politics-on-Twitter.pdf

Twitter is an echo chamber for both sides of the ideological spectrum, yet despite that critique often aimed solely at the left, conservative users are actually more likely to engage in that behavior:
"Third, we find important ideological asymmetries: Conservative users are roughly twice as likely as liberals to share in-group versus out-group content, as well as to add negative commentary to out-group shares. These patterns hold when accounting for the proportion of in-group versus out-group elites followed (i.e., users share in-group elites not only because they follow them more), across elite actors (but especially for politicians) and numerous issues, ranging from the economy to civil rights."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn9418

Summary:
- Twitter has more young and active democrat users
- Despite this, top accounts have similar followers and following across party lines
- Right wing content has more reach and algorithmic amplification and conservatives are more likely to favour their in-group

Twitter was your best bet. Facebook is dominated by right wing content, Talk Radio is dominated by conservative hosts, alternative news and political channels on Youtube who are skewed right have a larger audience and the most watched news on Cable is conservative with Tucker taking the clear lead. Again, the notion that conservative voices don't have a platform is a fantasy. They outperform everyone else.

 

[Bojka]

Yes, there are more democrat users on twitter that produce a greater volume of tweets, in part because that demographic is younger and more active, but that doesn't tell us anything about reach or engagement. You left something very important out from the pew research study that was used in the article:

"Despite these substantive differences in tweet volume, the top 10% most active Democrats and Republicans are comparable in terms of the number of accounts they follow (580 vs. 582), the number of accounts who follow them (342 vs. 354) and the number of tweets they favorite in a typical month."
https://www.pewresearch.org/politic...-democrats-and-republicans-behave-on-twitter/

So, despite democrat users being more active, the most active accounts on both sides of the political spectrum have a similar audience. More importantly, conservative and right leaning tweets have more engagement and are heavily favoured by the algorithm. Several studies have been done on this both internally and externally, and they all confirm that right wing and conservative content has greater amplification and reach on twitter:

"Twitter users, a fine-grained analysis of political parties in seven countries, and 6.2 million news articles shared in the United States, this study carries out the most comprehensive audit of an algorithmic recommender system and its effects on political content. Results unveil that the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com...hmic-Amplification-of-Politics-on-Twitter.pdf

Twitter is an echo chamber for both sides of the ideological spectrum, yet despite that critique often aimed solely at the left, conservative users are actually more likely to engage in that behavior:
"Third, we find important ideological asymmetries: Conservative users are roughly twice as likely as liberals to share in-group versus out-group content, as well as to add negative commentary to out-group shares. These patterns hold when accounting for the proportion of in-group versus out-group elites followed (i.e., users share in-group elites not only because they follow them more), across elite actors (but especially for politicians) and numerous issues, ranging from the economy to civil rights."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn9418

Summary:
- Twitter has more young and active democrat users
- Despite this, top accounts have similar followers and following across party lines
- Right wing content has more reach and algorithmic amplification and conservatives are more likely to favour their in-group

Twitter was your best bet. Facebook is dominated by right wing content, Talk Radio is dominated by conservative hosts, alternative news and political channels on Youtube who are skewed right have a larger audience and the most watched news on Cable is conservative with Tucker taking the clear lead. Again, the notion that conservative voices don't have a platform is a fantasy. They outperform everyone else.

Top Republican accounts have a similar number of followers, but there are still fewer of them. Meaning that the ratio of Dem to Rep accounts being followed is still 69:26.

With regard to the rest of the data, it could merely be from there being less conservative content. A similar phenomenon to Fox News historically having the highest ratings due to it being the only mainstream conservative network.

The ratio of left wing tweets to right wing tweets is more than 5:1. So the considerably fewer conservative tweets get more attention per tweet just from having less competition.

 

[Bojka]

Ok, I looked a bit into the study that studied 'reach' and I guess they specified politicians and it seems a bit dubious anyway. This is how they determined reach:

"We define the reach of a set T of tweets in a set U of Twitter users as the total number of users from U who encountered a tweet from the set T. Think of T, for example, as tweets from a group of politicians in Germany, and think of the audience U as all German Twitter users in the control group."

They are not accounting for whether the tweets received positive or negative attention. Much of the attention tweets get is negative, meaning it is being engaged by members of the opposing faction.

Twitter is an outrage echo chamber. Part of the reason conservative politicians have more 'reach' could merely be because people often focus on what they don't like more than what they like and so conservative tweets have a disproportionate amount of this type of 'reach' within the predominantly left wing user base.

If a tweet is getting disproportionate negative attention from the opposing faction, then that isn't relevant to this argument. You said yourself that left wing users are twice as likely to share conservative tweets as vice versa. So much of this conservative 'reach' is just going to be the left wing mob predominant on Twitter bitching about right wing tweets.

 

[idrankyourbeer]

F the data , anyone around in the last 7 years knows conservatives get banned, shadowbanned, censored, and deplatformed on all the biggest platforms...Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and the rest. Piss'em off badly and they'll go after your email accounts, web hosts, payment processors, and banks too, all in 24-48hrs like they're totally not in collusion or anything wink wink.

ahh yes. nobody has ever been more victimized than the american conservative. that must be it.

that kind of stuff would never happen to them if they werent being such shitty people who cant follow the rules of the platform they are using. a good way to avoid any of that kind of stuff happening would be to follow the rules and stop being such shitty people. but many of them just cant help themselves i guess.

 

[Sano]

Top Republican accounts have a similar number of followers, but there are still fewer of them. Meaning that the ratio of Dem to Rep accounts being followed is still 69:26.

With regard to the rest of the data, it is probably merely from there being less conservative content. A similar phenomenon to Fox News historically having the highest ratings due to it being the only mainstream conservative network.

The ratio of left wing tweets to ring wing tweets is more than 5:1. So the considerably fewer conservative tweets get more attention just from having less competition.

The distribution of 69:26 isn't accounts across party lines, it's the activity levels of those accounts. Moreover, the comparison was between the top 10% of democratic accounts and top 10% of republican. That number is fixed, regardless of who tweets more, and they had the same amount of followers. So while the democratic leaning ones are more active, both sides still have the same audience.

It isn't plausible to handwave amplification by relative comparison. Amplification is measured by the amount of total users who encounter a tweet. Both right wing news media and political tweets have higher total engagement on twitter. You would expect the opposite. Same is true for Facebook, but while the difference is smaller on twitter, Facebook is dominated by right wing content, shares and likes.

EDIT: To amend your last post, liberals were more likely to share out-group content but provided less negative coverage of it. In-group sharing is mostly highly critical of the other party on a place like twitter anyway. The evidence in that study points to conservatives being more negative of the outgroup, ie, bitching, not less. Lastly the amount of out-group sharing is so small that it wouldn't be enough to drive the amplification to that extent.

 

[Loiosh]

Ahhh yes. lol. I have seen some of that "data" and the mental gymnastics used to spin it in line with your argument.

Here is some data:

Of the Most Active Tweeters (who produce 92% of tweets):
- 69% are Democrat/lean Dem
- 26% are Republican/lean Rep
- Of these most active tweeters, Dem users tweeted twice as often as Rep users, so the skew in terms of volume of tweets is 84:16 or 5.25:1

In addition:
- Democrat Twitter users consider themselves more 'liberal' than Democrats within the general population. So Dem Twitter users are less moderate than Dems in general.
- The median Dem user has more followers and follows more accounts than the median Rep user

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/15/p...073KIHfeLL4AWe9qRvWabNMJxRBmB0oqp9c0AeNqLDqWx

No way. Reddit for example down votes conservative opinions into oblivion. Twitter is also very slanted left.

I don't know if you're right, so I retract my statement. I know that I've heard how ridiculous it is for conservatives to complain about tech censorship when it doesn't feel like they're being censored at all, especially on Twitter.

I know if I disagree with the wrong conservative on Twitter I get bombed, just like when conservatives disagree with the wrong progressive. If progressives are more present on social media because they tend to be younger, then great, maybe this entire complaint is just conservatives trying to strangle the flow of information like they are in schools and libraries. Stop doing that and have better ideas.

I'll leave this argument to Jackie who is a lot more plugged in than I am.

 

[brackis1]

Top Republican accounts have a similar number of followers, but there are still fewer of them. Meaning that the ratio of Dem to Rep accounts being followed is still 69:26.

With regard to the rest of the data, it could merely be from there being less conservative content. A similar phenomenon to Fox News historically having the highest ratings due to it being the only mainstream conservative network.

The ratio of left wing tweets to right wing tweets is more than 5:1. So the considerably fewer conservative tweets get more attention per tweet just from having less competition.

Can you name a single social media platform that begs left wing people to join and create a safe space away from evil right wing censorship?

 

[Bojka]

The distribution of 69:26 isn't accounts across party lines, it's the activity levels of those accounts. Moreover, the comparison was between the top 10% of democratic accounts and top 10% of republican. That number is fixed, regardless of who tweets more, and they had the same amount of followers. So while the democratic leaning ones are more active, both sides still have the same audience.

It isn't plausible to handwave amplification by relative comparison. Amplification is measured by the amount of total users who encounter a tweet. Both right wing news media and political tweets have higher total engagement on twitter. You would expect the opposite. Same is true for Facebook, but while the difference is smaller on twitter, Facebook is dominated by right wing content, shares and likes.

They took the top 10% of accounts that produce 92% of tweets and found that 69% were Dem and 26% were Rep. With regard to your 2nd point, the numbers are not fixed because we are dealing with percentages. The "top 10% most active" Dem accounts are higher in number than the top 10% most active Rep accounts because there are more Dem accounts. 10% of a higher number is a higher number.

The reach metric isn't very meaningful for reasons I stated in my 2nd response to you above. You said yourself that left wing users on Twitter engage with right wing content more than vice versa and so a disproportionate amount of the right wing 'reach' is just going to be left wing users raging about right wing tweets.

 

[Sano]

They took the top 10% of accounts that produce 92% of tweets and they found that 69% were Dem and 26% were Rep. With regard to your 2nd point, the numbers are not fixed because we are dealing with percentages. The top 10% of Dem accounts are higher in number than the top 10% of Rep accounts because there are more of them. 10% of a higher number is a higher number.

The reach metric isn't a very meaningful for reasons I stated in my 2nd response to you above. You said yourself that left wing users on Twitter engage with right wing content more than vice versa and so a disproportionate amount of the right wing reach is going to be left wing users raging about right wing tweets.

Yes, more tweets were produced by the dem accounts, but that doesn't say anything about what the split is between users' ideology, nor does it tell us anything about the nature of those tweets. The 69% and 26% split is between the people who produces the most tweets, not between the total userbase. It tells us that dem accounts are more active, most likely because dem users are younger. Granted I'm sure that there are more dem leaning users on the platform, but those numbers don't examine that.

When taking the top 10% of active users on both political sides and comparing them, yes, that number is fixed. We know that they have an equal amount of followers, that is explained in the article. So, regardless of whether or not the top 10% of active democrat users tweet more than the top 10% of the active republican users, they have the same audience.

I edited my last post to answer your theory about reach. It doesn't hold up when looking at the data. I'll just re-post it here:

EDIT: To amend your last post, liberals were more likely to share out-group content but provided less negative coverage of it. In-group sharing is mostly highly critical of the other party on a place like twitter anyway. The evidence in that study points to conservatives being more negative of the outgroup, ie, bitching, not less. Lastly the amount of out-group sharing is so small that it wouldn't be enough to drive the amplification to that extent.

 

[Bojka]

Yes, more tweets were produced by the dem accounts, but that doesn't say anything about what the split is between ideological users, nor does it tell us anything about the nature of those tweets and if they are political. The 69% and 26% split is between the people who produces the most tweets, not between the total userbase. It tells us that dem accounts are more active, most likely because dem users are younger on the platform. Granted I'm sure that there are more dem leaning users on the platform, but those numbers don't examine that.

When taking the top 10% of active users on both political sides and comparing them, yes, that number is fixed. We know that they have an equal amount of followers, that is explained in the article. So, regardless of whether or not the top 10% of active democrat users tweet more than the top 10% of the active republican users, they have the same audience.

I edited my last post to answer your theory about reach. It doesn't hold up when looking at the data.

Can you post the numbers from that study that prove left wing sharing of right wing media is insignificant?

I see the point you made about the account numbers now. I did misinterpret the information. My bad. Although, as you said, we would have to find what the actual ratio of Dem:Rep accounts is.

 

[Super_Nintendo]

ahh yes. nobody has ever been more victimized than the american conservative. that must be it.

that kind of stuff would never happen to them if they werent being such shitty people who cant follow the rules of the platform they are using. a good way to avoid any of that kind of stuff happening would be to follow the rules and stop being such shitty people. but many of them just cant help themselves i guess.

 

[brackis1]

Can you name a single social media platform that begs left wing people to join and create a safe space away from evil right wing censorship?

anything @Bojka ?