What I dislike about Twitter is how much significance things that happen on it are given.
With over 300mln active users if something has been retweeted, say, 15,000 times it still can't be reasonably counted as a "storm".
With over 300mln active users if something has been retweeted, say, 15,000 times it still can't be reasonably counted as a "storm".
So there is this effect where a small group of activists (20-30) can easily coordinate to launch a 100 tweets. They then reach out to online media outlets, which in turn report that a topic is trending, so it is officially 'news', and thus the cycle begins.
In particular, journalists are disproportionally over-represented on twitter and thus seem to (somewhat self-importantly) overvalue it as a discussion medium. At least where I am from, it is almost exclusively activists, journalists and politicians in their own Twitter bubble talking to each other and reporting about what they say about each other.
So as they believe in its importance, it becomes important, and thus opens avenues to manipulation by pr agencies or state actors or political splintergroups.
If you are not familiar but interested in learning more. This book is a good primer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
/s
A spike of retweets from 0,05% of the users is hardly a spike. If so, you would have to call every link to a funny cat gif on twitter a "Twitter Storm".
Which means their active user count may be 300m, but they reach far wider audience than that through citations through all kinds of other media, either through indirect mentions or through direct embeds.
Of course, the fact that they're not monetizing their influence effectively is another story, but just counting their user number to say they have smaller influence is just being naive.
You don't need something to go VIRAL! to be blown out of proportion...