Twitter Can Teach Us So Much

I was slightly doubtful about yesterday’s news that the Library of Congress would be archiving every tweet ever tweeted. My reluctance came from the assertion that the tweets could be useful for academic research. Today, Stupid Fight proved me wrong. The website scans the @ replies to two specific Twitter users for “stupidity indicators” and compares the results. What kind of indicators?

What do you mean by ‘stupid’?

Stupid Fight can’t go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that’s sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation ‘OMG’? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.

How could I not put it to the test?

And there you have it: An unassailable fact dredged from the wilds of Twitter.