With all the conversations about Twitter, I was intrigued to read this today:
Taken together, these facts paint a picture of a website that is relatively small (compared to the rest of social media), disproportionately influential with the political elite, and distorts both the right and the left in deeply destructive ways.
If you look at a chart of popular social-media sites, you’ll note that you have to look far down the list to find Twitter. It’s way behind Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. It’s below a host of foreign social-media sites. It’s below even Telegram and Pinterest. It sits just above Reddit as the 15th-most-popular social-media site in the world.
But that’s not all. Only a small slice of Twitter’s users are active. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, only 10 percent of tweeters create 92 percent of all U.S. tweets. Combine all the numbers, and 3 percent of the American population creates 90 percent of all Tweets. In other words, only a small minority of one of the smallest of the “significant” social-media sites produces any real content.