Twitter C/D

http://i.imgur.com/tijhhv2.png

On Nov. 7, the hashtag #pizzagate first appeared on Twitter. Over the next several weeks, it would be tweeted and retweeted hundreds or thousands of times each day.

An oddly disproportionate share of the tweets about Pizzagate appear to have come from, of all places, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Vietnam, said Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University in North Carolina. In some cases, the most avid retweeters appeared to be bots, programs designed to amplify certain news and information.

“What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” Albright said. “These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”

Online, the more something is retweeted or otherwise shared, the more prominently it appears in social media and on sites that track “trending” news. As the bots joined ordinary Twitter users in pushing out Pizzagate-related rumors, the notion spread like wildfire. Who programmed the bots to focus on that topic remains unknown.

Is it really so hard to purge all the eggs and obvious bot accounts? What value does all that sewage bring to the business?

Monthly active uniques

though it turns out you can't trade those in for dollars

germany is calling this "automated opinion shaping":

https://twitter.com/ridt/status/806958107167518720

silby otm except you can exchange them for $ via referrals. the volume for a particular hashtag / account / referral combo is small but with bots working on several thousand hashtags a day you can start to accumulate a critical mass. a less automated version of this is the entire basis of most online publishing. i imagine a crackdown is possible (and is happening) but i also imagine that it's an arms race that will be difficult to win.

anton newcombe called cassandra fairbanks a cow, right here on twitter dot com

those dont sound like real ppl

they sound like dickens chars

yah I feel like I have heard tangentially of one name and the other seems fake. but it could go the other way

I notably have a fictional name in the "too plausibly real" real tho

Julia Ioffe has been sacked by Politico for the tweet referenced here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/809171829248196608

to be fair, trump is probably fucking his daughter

"Gratuitous opinion had no place, anywhere, at any time"

Trump probably cool about being rumoured to be fucking his daughter tbh, as long as his daughter is widely acknowledged as hott

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-twitter-emoji-crooked-hillary-232647

that ioffe tweet was obv stupid and indecorous and in a perfect world she deserves some sort of punishment for that but probably also important to remember that the president-elect of the united states more or less rose to power saying stuff pretty similar to that

all journalists should tweet incest jokes about the president

when the president does it that means that it is not poor twitter etiquette

news org shd adopt an "anything goes" policy on twitter baby!

imo, regardless of the example set by the president, fucking yr own daughter is poor twitter etiquette

Gotta wonder if a) POLITICO would've shitcanned Ioffe if she weren't already one foot out the door, and b) if Ioffe would've made that tweet if she weren't already etc. Also curious to know if there's a significant difference between the attitudes of POLITICO and The Atlantic (where Ioffe's headed) w/r/t their writers' use of social media.

Matt Bruenig was fired from Demos during the primary for calling Clinton ally Neera Tanden a "scumbag" in a tweet.

Which is not to say Ioffe deserved to be fired. Probably neither deserved to be fired, and probably both tweets were ill-considered.

noo matt bruenig was given the choice to either stop constantly calling people names on twitter or be fired and he chose to be fired because being a rageball online was too dear to his heart lol

that website drives ppl fn insane lol

some nerd ass socialist lawyer is suddenly a wild pugilist, once he tastes blood he cant get enough and asking him to abide by any standards of decency is a violation of first amendment rights

i mean dont get me wrong i love respect free journalism but the 140 characters makes ppl lose all perspective

this website is a hell to me

when im offline for a while then come back to twitter im always like wtf is this horrific shit, but then an hour im back in the groove baby!

noo matt bruenig was given the choice to either stop constantly calling people names on twitter or be fired and he chose to be fired because being a rageball online was too dear to his heart lol

― lag∞n, Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:50 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that website drives ppl fn insane lol

― lag∞n, Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:53 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some nerd ass socialist lawyer is suddenly a wild pugilist, once he tastes blood he cant get enough and asking him to abide by any standards of decency is a violation of first amendment rights

― lag∞n, Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:55 PM (eight minutes ago)

you gotta respect it he died for what he believed in

i've thought about trimming back on people who talk about politics a lot, i'm really just on there for the poop jokes

https://68.media.tumblr.com/606fbd6a91600577c99eea64521a199a/tumblr_oi7nqs0iJI1qa9yvvo1_1280.png

you gotta respect it he died for what he believed in

― k3vin k., Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:05 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tru

current josh marshall meltdown over a gizmodo article saying tweetstorms are bad is the good twitter

yeah the bruenig thing was a seriously wtffff moment and went off the rails hardcore when every twitter buddy (or person who wanted to be his buddy) started hammering his perceived foes about how he, a real person with a job, was now without a job and they should die in a fire for not letting this man rage at others

the best part was he was only writing part time while holding an actual well paying lawyer job

can't remember, is gamergate lawyer a real lawyer now? he was married to a real lawyer, but I was thinking he got divorced and remarried or something

fraid i missed out on that "thread"

xp u sure about that? I thought I had seen tweets about how he had become unemployed.

tbf, I felt kind of the same way about the whole Salaita affair, like maybe he ultimately got canned because pro-Israel types were out to get him, but it's still probably a good idea for a professor to comport himself with some dignity on public social media and his tweets were bilious.

im not positive but it is my iirc

I mean his wife was posting "hire my husband" stuff for a while, so I figured that meant unemployed.

think he mightve lost his law job after idk? or maybe he just was looking for writing work... the brueings r lowkey shady

his wife seems great but that time she was all 'if everyone tells husband how wonderful he is, maybe he'll come back on twitter' made me rmde

chipper anti abortion socialist is admitly a novel approach

isn't that all of catholic twitter or w/e

yeah i mean i guess i just dont understand that culture

yeah, left catholics are like that corner of the political matrix you didn't believe really existed

left catholics are the coolest ppl imo, get me fired up

haha nice

best part of the bruenig thing was a bunch of twitter guys being totally incredulous that anyone could possibly be unfamiliar with the "scumbag steve" meme