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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Who really cares. The top number of mDAUs on twitter in the US is 41 million, and 42% of that are people 18 to 29 who are not super likely to vote in general. Somewhere north of 6% of active users are too young to vote. The most active twitter users are journalists, a few writers, activists, and celebrities. Twitter also isn't really a place where regular people go for election information.

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Twitter has a large off platform impact though. It's where information starts and/or spreads and eventually hits Facebook, less mainstream news sources, and in real life conversations.

I hope to live to see a world where some random famous person tweeting isn't listed as news, at all.

Is it where information starts? That seems highly questionable to me. Any references here?

Tweets often end up as major news stories on other outlets.

Twitter embedding made short statements look like quotes from larger speeches. It was interesting to see “A tweeted X and B tweeted Y” journalism for the first time.

Tweets making news doesn’t make tweets important, it just means journalists spend too much time on twitter.

IDK maybe care bc Twitter is used by politicians of all stripes to whip up their most rabid fans into violent mobs, and by state-sponsored disinformation outfits to throw fuel on the fire?

So they do that on twitter though? To clarify, in the US this seems to mostly happen at in person rallies advertised on Facebook and radio. In other countries WhatsApp seems to be the tool most favored for organizing angry right populists.

Twitter just doesn’t seem to be used that way. It’s mostly just hot takes, flaming, journalists arguing, and occasionally people mobbing to try to get some random person fired from their job.

Yes https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111341161/how-trumps-will-be...

That article literally says that the organization happened on facebook and only referred to that tweet. But that is cherrypicking, the rally had already been organized and was being advertised on all channels. We know for a fact that these groups primarily operate on Facebook. They could just as easily posted a short video of the man saying something similar. Twitter is incidental here.

Sure, it was not the only network involved but it clearly provided the initial spark. During the Jan 6 events as well, rioters were watching Trump's tweets and acting on them. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/crowds...

I'm not trying to say, fix Twitter and everything is fixed. But I take issue with the argument that it doesn't matter bc it has a small audience relative to other networks. It has been useful to reach a certain demographic and has real-life impact.

That seems like an irresponsibly circumstantial claim. I cannot believe that a tweet caused a “surge in the crowd”. Allow me to explain my thinking.

1. Based on my reading it seems like by mid afternoon cell reception on the mall and around the capitol was spotty at best and degrading. It seems unlikely many would have seen the tweet.

2. As noted prior, we know for a fact that the few organized parts of the mod did so via Facebook and to some extent signal. Disseminating a tweet under spotty connections through a secondary network is a leap with no supporting evidence.

3. Given the previous two points if the hypothesis is correct there should have been a time delay of more than a minute or two.

4. This isn’t really how mobs work. People are going to be more attuned to the feeling of the moment and the events happening physically around them.

5. No corroborating evidence is provided.

6. Even if true, twitter was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the mob. The claim you made up thread was that people like trump are whipping up mobs on twitter but the provided example is too many degrees removed to support such a strong claim.

I think it's very reasonable to observe the past few years of American politics and feel that words on Twitter matter and are powerful, including in heat of the moment. Thankfully / sadly depending on your point of view we don't have a counterfactual world in which we'd have had to deal with more veiled calls to violence / dog whistles to disrupt the lawful transition of power.

That seems to be the opinion of everyone regardless of political opinion: if Twitter truly didn't matter, the people who got kicked out of it wouldn't make such a big deal out of it. The fact that they do mean that they agree it's an important platform.

I'm just skeptical about the importance of twitter per se.

> if Twitter truly didn't matter, the people who got kicked out of it wouldn't make such a big deal out of it

I'm pretty sure that you can be trollish ass-hat and wrong at the same time. I think a lot of people tie up a lot of self worth in follower counts on twitter, but its illusory and probably not important. If you talk to any authors, musicians, or journalists with presences on twitter they'll all tell you that twitter doesn't drive traffic or sales its just a place to scream at people who mildly disagree with you.

I think the greatest trick that twitter ever pulled was convincing people that twitter mattered outside of twitter.

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