Good morning!
This week, professors from the University of Cincinnati analysed extensive amounts of Twitter data from 2016 in an attempt to find some of the key differences between how pro-Trump users and pro-Clinton users used the platform to campaign.
Meanwhile, no-code platforms have been getting tons of attention recently. While it might not be used to create the next Airbnb competitor, David Peterson discusses how the most useful application of this software could actually be in allowing non-technical generalists to build internal tools.
You might remember that I spoke to Greg Isenberg a few weeks ago about why the future of the internet is 'unbundling'. But Gaby Goldberg thinks that influencer bundling has just begun.
To round it off, Rob Sturgeon blocked apps from tracking his iPhone for one week. During that time, he was tracked...4,341 times by...33 tracking platforms. Ouch.
Gaming the Twitter System
Lessons from the 2016 presidential election
It’s 2020 and incumbent President Donald Trump is trailing in national polls. His political opponents are numerous and diverse, including disaffected Republicans represented by the Lincoln Project, Republican Voters Against Trump, and others in the “Never Trump” movement, as well as Democrats and progressives.
But is Trump's opposition too fractured as a social network to be an effective political force against him?
Scholars Jeffrey Layne Blevins & James Jaehoon Lee studied Twitter data from 2016 to find out how each side used the platform in the run-up to the election.
The full post has some amazing graphs and there's no way I can do them enough justice here, but here are some of the key takeaways from the study:
One of Clinton’s campaign slogans was “stronger together”. Ironically, it was the pro-Trump hashtags that got more retweets and engagements within larger single groups. Despite being larger in number, pro-Clinton tweets were widely dispersed into much smaller islands.
While Trump and Clinton did influence their own networks to an extent, neither was essential in their keeping their social networks together.
More pro-Trump accounts on the political right (including those outside of Russian troll farms) did a much better job pairing hashtags in their tweets. They used more hashtags (e.g., #MAGA, #AmericaFirst) and more importantly, paired them with hashtags favoured by the left (e.g., #ImWithHer). Pro-Trump accounts would also pair their campaign hashtags with completely unrelated to piggyback off their popularity, such as those related to the iPhone 7 release at the time.
In comparison to the pro-Trump accounts which are at the center of the network, the pro-Clinton ones appear to be moved to the margins of the network. This shows that pro-Trump accounts have more engagements and interconnects among a larger group, while pro-Clinton accounts have fewer interconnections between one another in comparison.
With the 2020 election fast approaching, it will be interesting to see if anything has changed over the past four years.
The future is no-code internal tools
Why “no code operations” will be the next big job in tech
There's been a huge surge in the popularity of no-code platforms over the past couple of years -- but it's probably not gonna be much use for building the next Airbnb clone. Rather, the real promise of no-code software is enabling a team of non-technical generalists to build the internal tools they need.
"If I were thinking about how to break into a startup right now, I would start building with these tools immediately. Even better, I’d start my own business on the side with only these tools," says David Peterson, partnership lead at Airtable.
"At my next company, whatever and whenever that may be, I’d wager that one of the first five hires will be somebody with this skillset. Somebody who knows how to build a company in the truest sense of the word."
It turns out that what happens on your iPhone doesn't stay on your iPhone after all
What I found out when I blocked apps from tracking my iPhone for one week
When Apple made an appearance at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2019, they also put up a sign. It wasn’t a billboard, as many news outlets claimed, but a 13-story Apple ad plastered onto the side of a hotel. It had one message: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone”.
To see if this was true, Rob Sturgeon tried a little experiment: blocked apps from tracking his iPhone for just one week. During that time, he was tracked 4,341 times by 33 tracking platforms.
He found that:
Google tracked him nearly twice as much as all others combined
Facebook and Amazon tracked him more than any other company (except Google)
The rest of the data goes to 29 companies, most of which he'd never heard of
The conclusion? We're all being tracked too much (iPhone users included).
The business of influencer bundling has only just begun
Curators are the new creators
We’re experiencing a content overload. There are an average of 550 new social media users each minute, and over 40,000 search queries on Google every second. The Facebook like button has been pressed 13 trillion times, and each new day welcomes another 682 million tweets.
With more creators, more content, and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis.
The real scarcity isn't content anymore. It's attention.
When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet, find the people who can do the curating for us.