Now I’m going to miss Twitter even more…not.


According to grinning asshat Jesse Waters, its demographic skews atheist female — urban, atheist, overeducated female! We’ve seen the metrics on it. It is mostly single women that have graduate degrees.

Wow, really? That sounds great! Conversations with smart women, sign me up.

Except…that doesn’t jibe with my personal experience of Twitter, and, well, it’s out of the lying mouth of Jesse Waters, and the numbers don’t match up with reality at all, as we might expect of Fox News.

70.4% of Twitter users are male, while only 29.6% are female.

Women get harassed and abused so much more than men on Twitter, so that’s much more in alignment with my impressions.

Comments

  1. says

    Did Watters come out with that “metric” before or after QElon’s poll came back with the unexpected result?

    Also, I get the feeling that “metric” he’s citing is nothing more than how he feels when “over-educated” women respond to his bullshit on Twitter.

  2. Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD says

    What was the percentage of women that had to speak in order to be considered as dominating the conversation?

  3. billseymour says

    … overeducated female!

    That sounds like what they’re really afraid of.

    This 76 year old cis het white male has learned a great deal from conversations with smart women, and learning is like candy to me.

  4. says

    I’ve been wondering about “over-educated,” as well. Does he mean “people who can school me without working up a sweat”? Because that’s gonna peg “over-educated” at anything past Kindergarten…

  5. divineconspiracy667 says

    Sweet baby Cthulhu, there isn’t a single thing they won’t lie or make shit up about, is there?

  6. lumipuna says

    Here in Finland, it’s kind of a cliche in mainstream commentary on social media to say that Twitter is “the social media of the elite”. I’ve understood this to mean Twitter is the platform where most journalists, scientists and other “intellectual influencers” go to reach out to the public. Sometimes, people (who aren’t on Twitter) misunderstand it to mean that most users of Twitter are distinctly intellectual types, which isn’t remotely true of course. Naturally, the phrase “social media of the elite” gets some mileage as a bit of ironic humor among the actual intellectuals on Finnish Twitter.

    The stereotype constructed by Watters here is clearly related, but slightly different. What he’s saying seems to boil down to suggesting that Twitter is “the social media of social justice warriors”. There may even be a grain of truth in this, as in Twitter is (or at least was) the best and most important platform for social justice activism, as well as for journalism or science outreach. But then again, Twitter is also a great platform for conservative culture warriors. And for a lot of other stuff, most of which is prominent also on other major social media platforms.

  7. raven says

    Twitter isn’t just social media.

    It is that but it is also an important part of the news media networks.
    Almost all news outlets worldwide use Twitter to announce their main and breaking stories.

    As such, Twitter is useful to a lot of people which is why it has a lot of internet traffic.
    I use it to follow the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which doesn’t require a Twitter account which I don’t have anyway.

    Facebook could die, which it is doing, and the world would be a better place.
    A lot of people will miss Twitter.

  8. says

    When I hear “overeducated,” what I think about is some capitalist dingus who thinks a student paid too much for college and/or got a job that doesn’t pay a worthwhile wage. Like it’s perfectly natural to consider profit and loss as the primary motivator in getting an education instead of following passions or wanting to contribute to society in a matter that requires such education.

    Of course, as others have observed, when a guy like this says “overeducated,” it’s just another dog whistle, blaming academic achievement for women being uppity with him instead of living in the kitchen.

  9. Ada Christine says

    oh is that phenomenon where when a woman is present at all in a predominately male group then the estimate of her level of talking vs the other men is automatically higher? or something like that.

  10. imback says

    Ariaflame wrote, “What was the percentage of women that had to speak in order to be considered as dominating the conversation?”

    That’s exactly what I was wondering before I read the comments. I suspect he starts feeling plagued if even just 1 in 5 respondents are identifiably women.

  11. R. L. Foster says

    Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU).

    That troubled me more than anything Jesse Watters had to say.

    As for the urban, atheist, overeducated female, that’s my wife. Question, how can one be over-educated?

  12. Akira MacKenzie says

    The fact that “overeducated” is a considered a valid criticism in this culture speaks volumes about the low-mentality of the average fucking moron American.

  13. Frederic Bourgault-Christie says

    Of course, notice the contempt for democracy even within their own premises (and the constant unwillingness to admit when they lose).

    Let’s say Twitter was mostly more educated women. So what? That would be the platform’s userbase. Musk polled the platform’s userbase. He lost. It wasn’t “rigged” anymore than 2020 was.

    But for them, it’s only democracy if the interests of cis-het white men are represented. Even if they’re not there. Even if they’re not the ones using the platform.

  14. billseymour says

    I heard on DW News this afternoon that the Taliban in Afganistan have decreed that women are not allowed to go to college.  If Watters fears “over-educated women”, I can tell him where to go.

  15. unclefrogy says

    men like that seem to have never left the 5th grade (age 12) and to have forgotten that they had mothers they sound more cartoonish then the Ferengi did on startrek I guess that sounding all stupid and obstinately opinionated and saying any f’n thing you want earns them some kind of points with someone or group. Not sure what overeducated is but it does seem better than dumb as a box of rocks

  16. Ridana says

    “It is mostly single women that have graduate degrees.” I’m not sure if he’s saying Twitter is mostly that demo, or if single women are mostly the only women with graduate degrees. The latter may be true to an extent, since post-graduate work places demands on students that favor men with partners who support them, and married women often lack such support from their spouses. That’s changing, but not fast enough.
    .
    Whatever he meant, this looks to me like more fuel on the “burn the single, college educated witch!” fire the right has been hawking since the midterms. Along with restricting reproductive freedoms, they’re more determined than ever to send women back to trad-wife subordination so those harpy single women will stop voting against rwnjs. Clearly we’re going to hear a lot more of this railing against single women in the future, so buckle in.

  17. billseymour says

    We should invent a new term like “social injustice warrior” (or something better than what I can come up with).

    We should also laugh at “manly men” who are afraid of women with agency. 8-)

  18. expatlurker says

    Ninety-five percent of all statistics are made up.
    “Don’t believe anything you read on the Internet.” – Abraham Lincoln

  19. Akira MacKenzie says

    As stupid as this sounds, I’m actually glad he’s smearing atheists. Obama’s administration made us complacent and gave us a false sense of security and even though Trump did the Bible-fucker’s bidding, he didn’t specifically target us as pariahs. Maybe reminding us that we’re still on the very low and despised level of the social and political pyramid will restart movement atheism, only this time the Horsepersons leading and speaking for us won’t be a bunch of misogynistic, transphobic, racist, capitalist assholes.