The Australian newspaper's Christian Kerr gives his opinion
Apparently the latest excuse for dismissing any support for the Australian Prime Minister's 9 October 2012 speech is the perceived failings of social media.
It would appear that Twitter doesn't count as a serious reflection of community attitudes because it is supposedly peopled by women with an average age of 28 years, who use an iPhone, have a propensity to like the colour purple and a small online following of about 280 other tweeters, according to male journalist Christian Kerr aka "Colonel Walter Kurtz" * * aka "Hillary Bray".
Kerr has obviously never read the Beevolve study of 36 million Twitter users he is quoting, because it was careful to point out that Only 0.45% of Twitter users disclose their age and those who do are predominately in the younger age groups - therefore the data here is skewed towards the younger demographic.
Further, the study was only able to determine gender for ~66% of the 36 million Twitter users because Gender information is not readily available on a Twitter user profile.
As 70% of twitter users also didn’t have their bio specified, to differentiate gender the survey guessed using account names, avatars and whatever else could be casually gleaned and, we all know that names and avatars are often used as a running gag and frequently don't reflect true gender.
When it comes to Kerr's fascination with colour, it should be pointed out that of those whose gender was either confirmed or guessed at, 22.1 per cent of female tweeters preferred the colour purple and 36.1 percent of males preferred a steel grey hue. However, calculations exclude the default twitter profile colors, so even these percentages are suspect.
Yes, world wide A twitter user on average has 208 followers, but as this survey apparently counts the 25% of Twitter users who have never tweeted all those zeros skew this average.
Additionally, as this was a commercial marketing potential survey, it did not create a category for tweets with political content, so Kerr can have no real idea of the average global profile of those tweeting about Gillard's speech.
So basically, Christian Kerr has decided on very little evidence that political tweets tend to be ferociously partisan (presumably excluding those from the many representatives of mainstream media found on this social platform) and are probably infected with girl germs. Which means that these can easily be dismissed if they don't agree with his assessment of any issue.
But what if Kerr was right to suggest that support for the Prime Minister was being driven by a Twitterverse dominated by women? Why does either the social platform or a tweeter's gender make this support any less legitimate? Ah, yes - it would be because the gender in question is female.
** You’re a little c***, but as someone who’s worked as either a pressie or political advisor for two federal cabinet ministers and a state premier, I’ve got to say that I firmly believe your site was crucial to Saturday’s outcome.
[Quote from a Hotmail allegedly sent by "Colonel Walter Kurtz"]
[Quote from a Hotmail allegedly sent by "Colonel Walter Kurtz"]
