Is Twitter just a tool for the chattering classes? It seems so. A new Prospect/YouGov poll reveals that the belief of Twitter users in civil liberties is the most important factor distinguishing them from the general public. British users showed liberal inclinations in October, by breaking a court injunction banning the Guardian from naming mining company Trafigura. They then turned on Daily Mail writer Jan Moir for ill-judged remarks on the death of gay pop star Stephen Gately, and Sunday Times critic AA Gill for shooting a baboon on safari.
Such actions are part of a broader trend. Our poll shows that while 57 per cent of Britons think greater police powers to tackle terrorism are more important than protecting civil liberties, less than half of Twitter users agree. Fifty-six per cent of the public agree that “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men,” compared to only 45 per cent of Twitter users. And on a relative scale constructed from our poll data (see graphic above) Twitter users are among the most liberal groups in Britain.
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[...] More on the Prospect magazine site [...]
[...] to how relatively speaking it’s a self-selecting twitterverse (recently highlighted in the Prospect magazine poll) and that as a result most active participants feel an inherent “connection” or [...]
[...] Rather depressingly: Fifty-six per cent of the public agree that “the greatest victims of discrimination in Britain these days are often ordinary white men” [...]
[...] to politics again, but I think anyone can see the wider implications for social media in this new Prospect poll about who uses twitter. I’ll let the excellent Dizzy Thinks blog spell it out for [...]
I’m sorry – you haven’t a clue.
http://richardstacy.com/2009/11/18/shock-new-telephone-users-poll-from-prospect-magazine/
[...] fun piece of research from Prospect Magazine has concluded that UK twitter users are mostly liberal bleeding heart environmentalists that hate the Daily [...]
[...] New Prospect Poll: The Rise Of Britain’s Liberal “Twittering Classes” [...]
Twittering is for idiots: anyone not put off by the name alone is seriously deficient in sensibility. Although I suppose it is more a case of the lemming tendency; fashion victims all, they appear to be left or liberal because, whatever is ‘a la page’ reformulates itself as their deeply-held belief.
[...] Prospect Magazine (still the most intelligent of the monthlies by a long way) offers the results of an interesting poll conducted on its behalf by YouGov in which, it seems, Twitter users across the UK do pretty well (a [...]
This is such a non-story. You report that (a) many British Twitter users are under 35, and (b) Twitter users share similar political attitudes to those aged under-35s. Do you think those two facts might be related? Is (b) surprising in the light of (a)?
Anything for a press release….