GamerGate "Movement" on Twitter Driven by Just 500 Accounts & 3000 Daily Users, MIT Lecturer Finds

MIT lecturer Michael Trice crunched the numbers around the #GamerGate hashtag on Twitter during the first week of November, and came up with this shocking stat:

In both the case of tweets and RTs about 500 accounts create half of the total volume in the conversation. Regular daily participation floats around 3,000 users. Then there’s a large body of several thousand accounts dipping a toe in the conversation.

Overall participation in that hashtag during that time frame was around 16,000 accounts total, and it's not even clear how many accounts are advocates of the "movement", as opposed to detractors. In any case, kudos to Trice for doing the heavy lifting to get the concrete data, which as it happens, is in line with my September estimate that GamerGate is around 10,000 guys, give or take a few thousand.

It's a fitting demonstration that it's possible for several hundred extremely dedicated people to seem like hundreds of thousands, and power a social media "movement" that's taken seriously by the world media and an industry worth tens of billions of dollars. How that's possible and what should be done about that reality is a post for many tens of thousands of words -- more words, as it turns out, than GamerGate had followers.

Hat tip: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamernews/">GamerGhazi.

Please share this post:

Tweet

Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

Sadly 500 is enough. Enough for the 4chaner's threats to become real at least one time too many:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/4chan-user-posts-photos-of-woman-he-murdered.html

http://www.kgw.com/story/news/crime/2014/11/05/kalac-killer-homicide-port-orchard/18544895/

http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/port-orchard-murder-suspect-returns-washington/nh23s/

[Leo]

@Pussycat Catnap 4chan officially banned any GG related discussion some time ago. GG is on 8chan. The whole incident with the murder has nothing to do with GamerGate. Do your research on both sides and not just turning a blind eye towards one side.

[Pussycat Catnap]

4chan, 8chan, inset-number-here-chan.

Its the same people all around, trying to rebrand to avoid the eye of the public now that the world knows its a cesspool of misogynistic hate.

[Fred]

Here we go yet again. The article is pretty useless really, are there any other datasets to compare with and how are other tags doing that week?

I do not find the article itself shocking, however the immediate "mysogynic" comments are, #gamergate is not about hating women, we surely can agree on that since this has been this blogs favourite subject (and probably done wonders for the visiting stats) and has been discussed over and over again ( in the most commented articles on this blog) the only winners are the advertisers, no?

[irihapeti]

"Here we go again. The article is pretty useless really" says Fred of the 500

q: (:

[Facepalm]

What a load of tosh as though it's surprising that there would be a hardcore element of a movement with the most hardcore being the fewest and it dropping off from there. 10,000 people is hardly anything to scoff at.

It's almost surreal how far people will go to deny that GG has quite a mixed demographic, 'is around 10,000 guys' mmmk then. Three women debating on Huffington Post, one of whom a feminist, The NotYourShield statement, the fact that Gawker has hardly any advertisers left after such names as Intel decided to rightfully drop them. That pro GG tweats have been going steady for nearly two months while the anti GG ones took an enormous nose dive almost from the outset.

Make of the numbers what you will but GG is starting to get some real successes for what is a consumer revolt.