Photo Credit: Davesag (Flickr.com)
Follow-up: Topic [Twitter]
A crafty fellow named Tom Scott saw a lot of stupidity on Twitter, and he decided to do something about it:
He built an application that will tell you which users have the dumbest fans.
So, for example, let’s say you want to know who has stupider Twitter followers: Fox News pundit Glenn Beck (@glennbeck, 216,000 followers) or conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh (@limbaugh, 60,000 followers). You just plug the Twitter account of both of these pundits in, and voila! You’ll find that, according to the site, @glennbeck’s fans are stupider.
The software uses an algorithm that analyzes followers for 20 different indicators of “stupidity”, and then generates a score. The scores are compared to determine relative stupidity.
I’m happy to say that my own Twitter followers are the picture of intelligence (I rank a perfect score on the algorithm, probably because I have so few followers right now). My childhood musical icon, “Weird” Al Yankovic, sadly, had a rather high stupidity index score of 465 (out of 800). I win that battle.
But Al just barely edges out Conan O’Brien, who in turn has followers who look like geniuses compared to Kim Kardashian’s.
Finally, a good use for Twitter! But somehow, I can’t help thinking that we’re all losers in the end…
2 comments
Helen
April 6, 2010 at 7:14 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
My guess is that alyankovic’s results are skewed by the sheer number of his fans and by the fact that a lot of them are young. Yes, they are. He’s been around a long time, but his fanbase is constantly renewing itself.
I’m tempted to ask my fellow fan friends to send him some perfectly grammatical, free of “leetspeak” and “lolspeak” replies, just to see if we can tweak his scores.
The odd thing is that his wife Suzanne’s followers seem to be smarter than Al’s followers. Go figure. And she’s not a celebrity.
Sean J. Jordan
April 6, 2010 at 9:57 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Oddly enough, Glenn Beck’s followers also register as smarter than Al’s followers. It probably has a lot to do with algorithm bias.
Of course, LadyGaga’s fans are among the stupidest on Twitter, according to this site… which gives it some validity in my book. :-)