Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
Twitter has a Community Notes feature that attempts to flag posts that contain misinformation. This might work well in theory, and the notes are often informative, but it works slowly and is often not enough to stop the spread of misinformation in a viral tweet. Bloomberg shows the spread through the lens of a single tweet.
Tags: Bloomberg, misinformation, Twitter
Posted by in Bloomberg, Infographics, misinformation, twitter
When you click a link on Twitter, you go through a Twitter shortlink first and then to the place you want to go. When you click on a link that points to one of Twitter’s competitors, by complete coincidence I am sure, there’s a delay. For The Markup, Jon Keegan, Dan Phiffer and Joel Eastwood ran the tests. You can also try it with your own URLs.
I’m into the animated opening graphic.
Tags: slow, The Markup, Twitter
Posted by in Infographics, slow, The Markup, twitter
Twitter Blue is a subscription service from Twitter that primarily provided premium features like link aggregation and tweet editing. However, after the acquisition, the service primarily let people acquire a fancy blue checkmark. Stuart A. Thompson, for The New York Times, used data collected by Travis Brown to show who paid for their checkmarks.
It’s a big scatterplot. Each dot represents a Twitter user, plotted by registration date on the x-axis and follower count on the y-axis. The scrolly piece guides you through the dots.
Tags: followers, New York Times, Twitter
Posted by in followers, New York Times, Statistical Visualization, twitter
You might have heard that Elon Musk bought Twitter, and among the many recent changes to the platform comes what appears to be an ideology shift. Gerrit De Vynck, Jeremy B. Merrill and Luis Melgar, for The Washington Post, show the shift through the lens of a baseline chart and follower counts among popular Democrats and Republicans.
Tags: Elon Musk, followers, politics, Twitter, Washington Post
Posted by in Elon Musk, followers, Politics, Statistical Visualization, twitter, Washington Post
Twitter isn’t in a great place right now, so maybe you want to do something with your account and your tweets. Julia Silge outlines how to delete your tweets with R:
If you are looking to remove yourself from Twitter, you can delete your account, but I’ve seen some folks say a better initial move may be to delete the content from your account (perhaps including followers and following), and then take your account private or deactivate it. In this blog post, I’ll walk through how to use rtweet to automate some of these steps.
Social media in general hasn’t been my thing for a few years now, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but you can find me on Mastadon. Or we can go back to blogs Xanga-style, and I’d be okay with that.
Tags: Julia Silge, R, Twitter
Posted by in Coding, Julia Silge, R, twitter
I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but there’s this game called Wordle. You get a certain number of guesses to figure out a five-letter word each day. Apparently a lot of people play it, so much so that Robert Lesser collected 15 million Wordle-related tweets since January. Then he analyzed the popularity and difficulty levels of all the daily words.
The above chart shows the daily words sorted by difficulty level. “Swill” gave people the most trouble, but contrary to common belief, the words do not appear to be getting more difficult.
Anyway, check out this Wordle game. It’s not the word cloud thing anymore (tear).
Tags: Robert Lesser, Twitter, Wordle
Posted by in Robert Lesser, Statistical Visualization, twitter, Wordle
Twitter released a small JavaScript library to make density plots — for when you have a lot of overlapping points and could use some granular binning. Feed a method an array of thousands of x-y coordinates, and the library takes care of the rest.
Tags: JavaScript, Twitter
Posted by in Coding, javascript, twitter
For NYT’s The Upshot, Kevin Quealy has been cataloging all of the insults Trump tweeted over the past five years. The project is complete:
As a political figure, Donald J. Trump used Twitter to praise, to cajole, to entertain, to lobby, to establish his version of events — and, perhaps most notably, to amplify his scorn. This list documents the verbal attacks Mr. Trump posted on Twitter, from when he declared his candidacy in June 2015 to Jan. 8, when Twitter permanently barred him.
Tags: insults, Kevin Quealy, Twitter, Upshot
Posted by in Infographics, insults, Kevin Quealy, twitter, Upshot
Twitter was hacked yesterday. Over a few hours, prominent accounts were tweeting that they were feeling generous during these times, and that if you sent them Bitcoin, they would send double the amount back. For The New York Times, Matthew Conlen and Lazaro Gamio show the Bitcoin scammed as more tweets flowed in.
Tags: Bitcoin, hack, New York Times, Twitter
Posted by in Bitcoin, hack, New York Times, Statistical Visualization, twitter
But that was not the only Tweet I made about this. I made a whole frigging thread. You can see the thread in most Twitter clients by clicking on the Tweet. But I figured I would also capture the thread here in this blog post. Tweet #2 in the thread.So @PatSchloss had a Tweet a few minutes ago about a comment he got suggesting Twitter threads are more effective than blog posts and I thought I would comment about this in a thread 1/n https://t.co/WxHXyFTZOS— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 23, 2019
Tweet #3 in the Thread.I think this is only partially true. In the short term and for most purposes, Twitter threads are probably more effective. 2/n— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 23, 2019
Tweet #4 in the Thread.But Twitter threads mostly seem to get lost / ignored after a short period of time (days) 3/n— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 23, 2019
Tweet #5 in the Thread.Blog posts on the other hand have longer legs and also have the advantage in most cases of being updatable and more able to accommodate different formats and such 4/n— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 23, 2019
Note - I got the embed codes for these Tweets from Twitter by selected the drop down menu in the upper right of the Tweet which I see in Safari at the Twitter site. I am not sure if this shows up in all Twitter clients but it works on the Twitter web site.So what I have started doing in some cases is posting Twitter threads and then capturing them via @wakelet or embeds into a blog post with some other details and this then has a bit longer lifespan than the thread itself. 5/n— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) March 23, 2019
Yes. I have a blog post I’ve given to 100+ people over they past few years. Tweets are pretty ephemeral. https://t.co/nc6fVcCmqw— Pat Schloss (@PatSchloss) March 23, 2019