Saturday, April 17, 2010

According To Twitter Science, Nick Swisher's Fans Are Dumber Than Sarah Palin's


Stupid Fight: Sarah Palin vs. Nick Swisher

Stupid Fight: Sarah Palin Vs. Kim Jones

Stupid Fight: Nick Swisher vs. Kim Kardashian

From the site:
What's this all about?
FACT: A lot of people on Twitter are stupid. Many of these people follow celebrities and try to send them messages. But which celebrity's fans are most stupid? It's time to find out.
Who made it?
Hello. I'm Tom Scott. I live at tomscott.com, and you can email me or follow me on Twitter. The crowd photo is from Anirud Khoul and is CC-licensed.
What do you mean by 'stupid'?
Stupid Fight can't go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that's sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation 'OMG'? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.
How valid are Stupid Fight's results?
Like the Body Mass Index, it's an excellent indicator but may not work for certain people. It is, for example, blind to irony. It may have issues with non-English languages. Its accuracy given one individual Twitter message, or one individual user, is quite low. On average, however, it's not a bad test at all.
Who do you count as a 'fan'?
The last 100 people to send an @reply to the target celebrity.

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