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  • The Atlantic

    The Twitter Electorate Isn’t the Real Electorate

    Social media is distorting our sense of mainstream opinion.
    by Helen Lewis Jan 13, 2020 5 minutes
    Source: Derek Brumby / AlexRoz / shutterstock / The Atlantic

    Does Twitter matter? The temptation is to say no. Its user base is small compared with Facebook—321 million monthly active users versus more than 2 billion—and a quick glance at the trending topics reveals its fractious, claustrophobic atmosphere. Yet as one dead fox proves, it does matter: On December 26, a single tweet by a British lawyer with 178,000 followers, announcing that he had killed a fox with a baseball bat, made the front pages of two major newspapers.

    Yes, it was a quiet news day. But Twitter has become journalists’ easiest and most reliable source of cor-blimey (or OMG, to American readers) stories, because all of human life is there, . It is also the world’s wire service: Just look at Donald Trump, who drops his unfiltered thoughts straight onto Twitter, confident that they will be picked up by journalists. For

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