After 10 years of documenting the world in 140 characters, Twitter now has more than 300m active users. This might be far fewer than Facebook’s 1.5 billion, but Twitter arguably has a disproportionate influence on the world, partly because it attracts a significant number of politicians, journalists, and celebrities. Our expert panel explain how their field has been changed by the little blue bird.
Politics
Sharon Coen, senior lecturer in media psychology, University of Salford
Twitter has obviously been used to raise awareness of political topics, spread political messages and coordinate collective action. This has often come through specific campaigns such as #blacklivesmatter (protesting violence against black people) and #JezWeCan (promoting the candidacy of British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn).
But Twitter is also used to gauge public opinion, often producing a false sense of consensus or of how many people feel strongly about a topic (so-called Twitter storms). This is because users tend to connect with people who hold similar views to their own and are less likely to come across different issues and opinions. On top of this, by giving politicians personalised profiles similar to those of other famous people, Twitter has helped turn them into celebrities rather than public servants.
Science
Philip James, senior lecturer in geographic information systems, Newcastle University
Twitter data opens up new horizons for scientists, both as a rich data source in its own right but also as a way of gathering information from the public. This has the added benefit of increasing their awareness of and participation in science. Twitter data gathering can be passive (capturing tweets that are already published) or active (asking people to take part in a project and send in information).
For example, for a project to model urban floods we asked people to tweet information about flooding near them to help us select the most accurate scenario produced by our simulations. Because this data was constantly being created we could update the model every few minutes. For another project, we gathered geolocated tweets from around north-east England and used a map-matching algorithm to calculate the likely journeys the Twitter users were taking between locations. We then used this to model how changes to infrastructure, such as road closures, would affect traffic flows.
Business
Aleksej Heinze, senior lecturer in digital business, University of Salford
Twitter has opened up a two-way communication between businesses and their customers. On the one hand this means it’s easier for customers to complain to a company - and do so publicly. But it’s also much quicker and easier for companies to reply and potentially resolve an issue, and can potentially even reduce customer support costs.
For example, in 2010, Xbox set a Guinness World Record for being the “most responsive brand on Twitter” after answering over 5,000 enquiries a day. This creates a vital indication that a company cares about its customers and so increases trust in the brand. Although, high expectations can also lead to disappointment.
