Innovative Visionary

So last night I was wandering around Twitter when I stumbled onto a tweet that caught my eye.

My first thought was “Wow, that is pretty awesome.” but like a responsible person I actually went to find the data that was used to prove this. Not that I should have been surprised but this was based on 1 data point (you have to scroll to the bottom to get to what they are referring to, I’ll get to how much more ridiculous that makes this in a bit) that the person had been given. They then proceeded to pat themselves on the back and take credit for this. This then got RT’d and RT’d by tons of people, no one even questioning the validity of the statement.

Now if this was just some random political spam rag saying this I’d have probably just let it go, but this effort was suppose to be standing up against a person who they say is the biggest misinformer in the land, Glen Beck. Their description even says

I’ve had enough of Glenn Beck’s vitriol, misinformation, race baiting, & incitement of violence – and so should you. – Off @StopBeck

but yet they allow themselves to do the exact same thing by just spewing garbage data to push their agenda forward without even understanding what the data means. Now to me this is just ridiculous so I called the person out and they gladly responded saying I had a “baseless assumption & lob[sic] insults” even when I linked to the data that proved exactly what I was saying. So lets just knock out the data real quick as it’s just ridiculous this ever got tweeted in the first place.

First, the reason it says Quadrupled is because that’s the title of the post, except that was referring to the original post on the forum about data from months ago and was for a 1 week time period. The out did quadruple if you went over the past 2 weeks, but not over 1 for this final chart on the page. But here is the thing, you had to scroll past 5 other charts that showed the heavy fluctuation of these numbers, one of them shows and explains how the Transfer In numbers are always more then the Transfer Out numbers. So on this page that they are sharing to all, there is data you have to scroll past that proves their argument wrong but still just go to their one chart they need to make their case, not fully understanding what it means.

If you would like to see the original source of the data you can get the Transfer Out here and more importantly you can get the Transfer In data here. What do we see? There were twice as many transfers in as out. Now I know I had to make 2 clicks to get that chart from the original post and that’s a lot of work when you already have your “proof” in front of you so why ruin it by finding data to show you how wrong it is.

Now that I got how easy it was to see I let the person know the best way I know, by pointing out to them they are just as stupid as the person they are attacking. They did just say “As far as I’m concerned, credibility is far more valuable than avoiding any short term embarrassment” so they should be fine with me poking fun at how obviously hypocritical this all is. So I sent this.

Well I guess they didn’t mean that credibility stuff because I was called “obnoxious”, that I’m making a baseless assumption, and making “silly insults” before he proceeded to basically hang up on me. I thought I was trying to talk to Sean Hannity or Stephanie Miller for a second. Instead of actually addressing and admitting that he didn’t care if it was true before he shared it with the world, that it wasn’t “an intentional misrepresentation” so it was okay. Are we spotting a pattern of similar activity to those that they are attacking. Yes this isn’t to the level of the Grand Misinformer himself, but for being so against what he does you would think you would be more conscience about using the same tactics.

On top of all of this is the fact you have zero data to actually correlate those transfers to why they moved. As can been seen from the previous charts, people leave all the time and in numbers as high as this so there are definitely other factors for leaving. So on top of it being easy to show with the numbers that it was way off, it didn’t really matter because you had no real ability to type it together. But hey lots of people have trouble with the whole idea that “correlation does not imply causation” which is understandable because you wished you actually had an impact.

Normally I would have just taken a couple more jabs at him for his hypocrtical behavior but then this tweet caught me and led to all of this.

How exactly are you going to “correct the record” when you already had done all this? Are you going to tweet to every person who RT’d this message or made a comment based on this message to tell them you are wrong? I bet not, and really I doubt that the person behind the account would even know where to begin. So let me show you all, mainly because you really need to understand how widely and quickly bad information like this can travel and never really be corrected.

First lets look at direct Twitter Platform RT’s. There were 3 messages put out and at the time of this writing had 17, 10 and 37. You can’t see everyone who RT’d it on the tweet itself so some could be duplicates but that’s at minimum 37 people who RT’d the message and that’s without the link. By looking at backtweet we can see at least 53 tweets of links to that page with the data (again could have duplicate users with other RT’s so can’t just add together.) If we look at twitter search there are around 70 references made to those tweets, some including commentary about it that believe it. We can’t see all url shortner clicks and I’ve stated many times that these are not accurate because of bots, but you can see a significant number of people did click through by looking at just those through bit.ly we see over 400 clicks. This is a significant amount of people that would need to be updated with the facts that what was said was not only wrong but so obviously pointless that it should have never even been tweeted in the first place.

And @StopBeck isn’t the only person at fault for this. Look at all the people sharing this info without ever questioning it. Every person who shared it just took it at face value and had no clue what it really meant. They are basically all sheep for a cause that is against Beck and the sheep who follow him. Social Media just helps ignorant people spread stupidity at faster and faster rates. This isn’t just an issue with political issues either as Social Media Experts also do the same all the time. And as always expect you to prove their idiotic statement wrong beyond any doubt before they will admit that they should have “maybe” thought about not doing it. Sadly I think the Idiocracy might come sooner then the movie predicted.

Is there really any way to correct this? Any easy way? Tweeting it won’t guarantee that they RT it for their followers to see. You could contact all these people directly, but again, you can’t force people put out your correction, and why would they when they have the same bubble around there head that they don’t want to burst. In the end there is nothing that you can do to help fix the damage done through the ignorance of actions such as this. While this is the power of such a medium when you look at things like the Iran Election where once it’s out you can’t stop it, it’s also just as effective at lying and astroturfing. As well, there are a lot more of the later of those situations happening every day as compared to the positive ones. Could you put a new post on that forum to say hey this is wrong, sure, but how many people are going to go back if they even did click on it to see if it changed. They are happy with the lie they were fed so why would they want to change that. I wish I could throw up a magical solution here but really I can’t. I just hope after reading this you will put a little more thought into what you say because you are fully aware of what the ramifications are of that. That instead of just blindly RTing and sharing you might take a moment to actually see if you know you are sure what is being said is true and not a fabrication.

So sorry for another long one but it had to be spelled out. While this is political I think it really is a good example of how misinformation can easily spread, especially when sent by people with an agenda to those who are blind sheeps to them. It’s just even funnier when it’s so hypocritical to the cause they are standing up against.

Disclaimer : While I normally talk Marketing idiocy, I had to cover this as it falls into the similar vein of data that’s not researched being used to make statements of no merit to “prove” ones case. I am not a Beck supporter and actually loathe the guy. Maybe it’s what he may or may not have done back in 1990. But that doesn’t change my feeling at what transpired here. I voted for Bob Barr last election and recently have been defending Obama, so please don’t think this is some Right Wing nut attacking the Left. Where I have extremely strong feelings is about ethical and intelligent use of data. May add more if a question about motive need to be addressed.

Update – Even before I posted this I got called a liberal by a right wing nut job.