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> such a [...] influential platform

Influential amongst whom?

Some people (eg Trump) are notorious for their use of it, but beyond that how can that notion be supported? Influential people might post on it but it's not like they're not on TV or in newspapers saying the same thing. Twitter's influence seems vastly overrated.

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Anything that people spend lots of time on, and that gets to decide what they experience, is going to be influential. It shapes what they know about the world and how they feel about it, after all.

If you added up all the advertising money spent and all the payments to “influencers” and all the money spent on bot farms and fake accounts, you could approach a measure of that influence’s value.

OK, but Twitter has about 330m monthly users, that's not much compared to Facebook, TV, newspapers, radio, etc.

Consider that 10% (probably more like 1%) of people make decisions that effect how society will go. At least in the English speaking world, those people care about what's happening on twitter. The other 90% use Facebook.

Real-time infovores, high-value segment

Possibly all, of the current social topics came to be topics because of academics and minorities leading the culture on that same site that has cache with the various kinds of elites.

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