Twitter trump protests8/22/2023 That means that he can readily change who works at Twitter, such as laying off half its workforce, or how Twitter’s functions work, such as changing Twitter verification policies so that anyone able to pay $8 a month can get a blue verification checkmark. The $44 billion deal that gave Musk control of Twitter basically gave him control of, well, Twitter. There was no transparency about how the poll was administered or promoted or how the votes were verified and counted. If Musk had truly wanted a broader sample of people’s opinions, could he have kept the poll open longer? After all, whether Trump should be on Twitter wasn’t exactly an urgent DEFCOM 1 matter. This, in turn, could have introduced significant biases into the results. Giving people not much more than a day to respond likely favored those folks who happened to be on Twitter during that time period, had strong enough motivation to respond quickly, and believed that Musk would listen to them. So if you happen to have had anything else going on in your life during that one-day period besides being on Twitter, you could have easily missed the poll or perhaps filed it away as “I’ll respond later after my bout of diarrhea ends” or something like that. The poll appeared to open on a Friday (November 18) and close on a Saturday (November 19). Musk did not provide much time for people to respond. Did Musk voice any of these characteristics? Umm, vox no. The bigger the difference, the more non-representative and potentially biased the responses may be. One common way of determining how representative your sample might be is to report the relevant characteristics (e.g., age, sex, political affiliation, socioeconomic status, and botitiude) of those who responded to the poll versus those who did not and determine how similar versus different they are. Therefore, you’ve got to determine whether the sample polled is truly representative of the overall population. For example, choosing a Justin Bieber concert to determine what percentage of people have heard of Bieber would be kind of biased in the Biebs’ favor. The latter situation could result in some major biases. With any poll, the question is whether the results truly represent what the entire population of interest (in this case Twitter users) believes or instead reflects the thoughts of only a particular segment of the population. Musk didn’t specify the characteristics of the respondents and the non-responders. Twitter polls won’t be able to achieve such standards as long as you can vote completely anonymously and establish anonymous accounts on the social media platform. Truly scientific polls will have safeguards that can verify whether someone voting is an actual human being and ensure that a given person no more than once. At the same time, a single person could set up multiple Twitter accounts to register multiple votes on such a poll. A bot may be able to log a vote or even multiple votes on a Twitter poll. Nothing about a Twitter poll seems to prevent such a possibility. You know the saying, “vote early, vote often?” Well, the risk with any voting or polling system is ballot stuffing, which is not a Thanksgiving dish but the practice of casting more votes than the the number of people who can legitimately vote. It’s not clear how many individual humans actually voted. On November 19, Twitter reinstated Donald Trump on to its platform after the company’s self-designated “Chief Twit,” billionaire Elon Musk, had tweeted, “The people have spoken.” This was based on results from a Twitter poll that Musk had posted asking whether he should “Reinstate former President Trump,” to which 51.8% of respondents had apparently answered “Yes.” So did such a poll have much scientific merit or were such results essentially “polling” your leg, so to speak, and potentially “polling” open the door for even more unscientific polls on Twitter in the future? And is this how Musk is going to decide whether to reactivate Twitter accounts that have been previously banned for spreading Covid-19, vaccine, or other health-related disinformation? Well, there are five major reasons why Twitter polls like Musk’s wouldn’t stand up to any type of real scientific scrutiny.ġ. (Photo Illustration by Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images November 19, citing the results from a poll that Musk posted. Billionaire Elon Musk reinstated the Twitter account of former U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |