It’s not clear what people understand when they say Twitter – they think of Twitter as a network and say it’s not representative and compare it to polls, for example. That is the wrong way to look at it – look at it as an information platform and then you start looking at what influential people who create the news are saying. The media, and I do not simply mean mainstream media, does influence public opinion. From a communication and a policy perspective that’s very, very valuable. It’s less about the representativeness of the platform as a whole; it’s more about the representativeness of the expertise and the influences within whichever topic you’re interested in. Because obviously you can’t poll the population from Twitter; but let’s say you want to understand the views surrounding a health issue then you have a great opportunity to gather the opinions of experts on that specific topic by monitoring Twitter data. That can be valuable evidence to inform policy.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC POLICY (Link to PDF)
After you read the article at The Nation about the “mean WoC” on Twitter click the link and read this paper. Then I invite you to chew on how this think tank produced the research, funded by the British government to spell out how social media influences not only policy but public discourses and civic engagement. After you’ve thought about that, consider what all these pieces about “mean people on Twitter” are really about. Especially, keep in mind these points vis a vis who owns the media that publishes them.
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