I’m unsatisfied with how I explained the deceptiveness of that gater’s topsy.com numbers. I worry it wasn’t clear enough (I could barely understand it and I wrote the fucking thing) so I’m going to have another go at this and I’m going to use the same methodology as the gater.
Here’s that gater’s search request: #GamerGate -SJW -ZQ -@femfreq -femfreq -“Sarkeesian” -“Anita” -Quinnspiracy -@Quinnspiracy -“Zoe” -“Quinn” -“LW” -“LiterallyWho” -“LiterallyWu” -“LW1” -“LW2” -“LW3” -feminism -feminazi -“Brianna” -“Wu” -SJW -women -woman
As you can see there are 1,736,213* tweets with the #gamergate hashtag and 1,564,693 of them contain no reference to the LWs. This means that the gater was indeed right: only 9.8789722% of #gamergate tweets mention the LWs. Looks good, doesn’t it?
Not so fast. We can’t just assume that the rest of the tweets discuss the alleged corruption scandals and DMCA abuse. We need to make sure so let’s perform the same search request but let’s substitute the alleged corruption scandals and the DMCA abuse for the LWS: #gamergate -grayson -nathan -mordor -wb -warner -bethesda -mcv -ausgamers -ea -gameplanet -joab -gilroy -patricia -hernandez -igf -indiecade -gamejournopros -mailing -list -dmca -takedown -kotaku -destructoid -rock -paper -shotgun -rps -sagal -chloe -pinsof -allistair -gonzalez -yanier -niero -dahlen -chris -deesing -jonathan -riendeau -danielle -green -holly
As you can see there are 1,736,213 tweets with the #gamergate hashtag and 1,699,347 of them contain no reference to the alleged corruption or DMCA abuse. This means that only 2.123357% of #gamergate tweets mention the alleged corruption or DMCA abuse. It also means that the LWs are mentioned more than 4 times as frequently as the alleged corruption and DMCA abuse.
* at the time this research was done
