Pirate's Cove

Yet another in a long line of 1st World Problems, namely, there are too many white males on Twitter, which totally means there is an inequality in society

(Daily Caller) The MIT Technology Review is pushing a study that claims Twitter has a white male problem, and that it’s keeping women and ethnic minorities down with what it calls a “glass ceiling.”

In a newly published article, the MIT Technology Review claims that social media plays an important role in “reversing inequality of various kinds.” Fair play to sites like Twitter and Facebook for bridging the class gap by enabling people to openly communicate to each other, but the study claims that a preexisting inequality exists, which works against efforts to end inequality.

The did a ton of research, looking at hundreds of millions of tweets and 50 million users over a 3 month time period, looking a race and sex using an algorithm that detects those from the faces of the user photos (what of those who use something different?), and have determined that 57% of users are males, 43% female (which will probably set the snowflakes off in rants about some being transgender and sexless). 68% are white. Which means

Messias and his group say that of the top percentile of Twitter users with the most followers they collected, 57 percent of them were men and 43 percent were women. The 15 percent swing represents the inequality in society, which they claim exists. “The results reflect the general idea that higher positions are usually taken by males,” Messias said.

White users also come out on top with the most followers “who are overrepresented by 20 percent,” according to the research, which the MIT article claims is evidence of white privilege. White females are similarly overrepresented by 3 percent. The study claims that the most underprivileged groups are Asian and black females, who are underrepresented by 31 percent.

Must be all those white males stopping people from joining Twitter and disallowing minorities from getting as many followers. There’s actually an extra button that white males can press. Whoops, should not have let that secret out.

Messias says that his group traced the way genders and races link to each other and found that people of the same race tend to follow each other more often than they follow people outside their groups. It’s an effect called “homophily.”

The article claims: “But the magnitudes of this effect are interesting. White people tend to follow more white people than expected by a margin of 16 percent. Black people tend to follow more black people than expected by a very significant margin of over 200 percent.

Seriously, what is wrong with these people? Let’s get real. People can voluntarily join Twitter. No one is stopping them. They can follow whomever they want. That’s up to them. I fail to see the problem with the demographics, but, then, I do not live in a state of perpetual Grievance.

BTW, the article notes that the facial recognition software doesn’t always get the race correct. It determined that an Asian female was white. But, it also said that Shaun King is white. Um, he is.

Crossed at Right Wing News.