I’m gonna sound biased and probably cynical here, but if you ask me… complaining about racism on Twitter, after the owner itself literally gave the green light to the worst behavior, is kinda like complaining that cars racing in a track are going over the speed limit.
Now, if you’re afraid that racism is spreading, let’s bring out some numbers.
Twitter has, at the time of this post, between 580-590 millions users.
Around 98-110 millions of them are from the US, so around ⅙.
So far seems worrying… but here’s the thing: Twitter has a bots problem.
There’s no precise percentage of their number, as they range between 20% (according to Nature) to 64% (according to 5th Column, in 2024).
For the sake of simplicity, let’s do an average of 45% of 110 millions.
If we take into consideration that bots likely lie or spoof their location because they intend to pass off as actual users, this means that nearly 50 millions are fake accounts, while around 60 millions are real.
So, given that the US has almost 380 millions of people, it means that about 17% of them is on Twitter, but keep in mind that not all of them are racist, so the actual percentage of racists could be even lower.
In fact, if you think about it, racist people tend to be just very loud, which makes them seem like an army, but if you take their voices and attention away from them, you’ll realize that they’re overall a minority.
