3 ms·

Seems to me like the virus will spread with or without any tweets. Twitter would like to think it has enough influence to affect it in any way, but that's simpl

by Grue3 7y ago

Seems to me like the virus will spread with or without any tweets. Twitter would like to think it has enough influence to affect it in any way, but that's simply not the case. Only 10% of Americans read Twitter at all, and the percentage who would read a specific tweet is staggeringly low.

catalogia 7y ago
Yeah this move seems rather self-aggrandizing to me. A move meant to make twitter seem more important than it actually is.
notafraudster 7y ago
One thing we've all learned about epidemiology over the last few weeks is that like many network processes, it's not about the raw number of infected, it's about their centrality to other networks of connections. Hence you get super-spreaders, like how over 80% of the cases in South Korea are directly traced to one person going to church. If we imagine that news and reporting works the same way, then what matters is not that only 10% of Americans read Twitter, but which 10%. If, say, all journalists and reporters and members of congress read Twitter, then that would be a conduit for misinformation posted on Twitter to spread more broadly, right? (I do agree that in the past Twitter's role in civic life has been overblown, e.g. westerners projecting Twitter as being operative in the Arab Spring when in fact most domestic organization in the Arab Spring was done over local mesh network apps and Twitter was mostly used to report the events to the English-language world, not initiate change internally)
- makomk 7y ago
  Careful. Remember, it only counts as a case if it's detected, and South Korea-style contact tracing is a lot less capable of detecting small clusters that have split off from each other due to the people tying them together no longer testing positive than they are large clusters involving the same people going to the same church or office with attendance-tracking on a regular basis.

by Grue3 7y ago

catalogia 7y ago

Yeah this move seems rather self-aggrandizing to me. A move meant to make twitter seem more important than it actually is.

notafraudster 7y ago

One thing we've all learned about epidemiology over the last few weeks is that like many network processes, it's not about the raw number of infected, it's about their centrality to other networks of connections. Hence you get super-spreaders, like how over 80% of the cases in South Korea are directly traced to one person going to church. If we imagine that news and reporting works the same way, then what matters is not that only 10% of Americans read Twitter, but which 10%. If, say, all journalists and reporters and members of congress read Twitter, then that would be a conduit for misinformation posted on Twitter to spread more broadly, right? (I do agree that in the past Twitter's role in civic life has been overblown, e.g. westerners projecting Twitter as being operative in the Arab Spring when in fact most domestic organization in the Arab Spring was done over local mesh network apps and Twitter was mostly used to report the events to the English-language world, not initiate change internally)

makomk 7y ago
Careful. Remember, it only counts as a case if it's detected, and South Korea-style contact tracing is a lot less capable of detecting small clusters that have split off from each other due to the people tying them together no longer testing positive than they are large clusters involving the same people going to the same church or office with attendance-tracking on a regular basis.