Travis Overton, Jeanette Gaida, Brenna Turner
Global Political Communication

Retweet Synthesis

Twitter was founded on March 21st, 2006 and since that time it has transformed into a global communication phenomena.  People from all around the world are beginning to use twitter for its personal, professional, and entertainment value.  Mary Meeker, an analysis for JP Morgan, presented a report on October 21st, 2009 at the annual Web 2.0 Summit about the annual trends of social networking sites and she found that Twitter currently has 55 million users and is growing at a pace of 1171% per year (MacManus).  Twitter, which once began as a niche website, has now grown into a powerful tool that people use to communicate with others simple because it is free, personal, highly mobile, and very quick.  Recently, Twitter has been one of the best ways to obtain news from countries that have stringent laws controlling their media as was the case when Iran tried to suppress media coverage when it was in the midst of an election protest starting on June 12th, 2009 (Grossman).  However, despite the growing number of user now found on Twitter a recent Harvard Business Review found that the top 10% of Twitter users account for a staggering 90% of the content (Heil, Piskorski).  The study goes on to say that half of all users on Twitter only tweet once every 74 days (Heil, Piskorski).  Another caveat of Twitter is the role of retweeting and its effect on the broader twitter community.

The art of “retweeting” is best described as taking a twitter message someone else has posted, and rebroadcasting that same message to your followers (How).  However, not every Twitter user retweets.  There are various reasons why people retweet and not every user retweets for the same purpose.  Research by Microsoft scholars found that there are numerous reasons why people retweet, but the most common reasons is to amplify or spread tweets to new audiences, to entertain or inform a specific audience, to comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content or for self-gain, either by attempting to gain more followers or by reciprocity from more visible participants (Boyd, Golder, Lotan).   Another reason why people retweet is to build trust.  The essay How to Retweet: A Simple Guide claims that “Retweeting will most likely build your personal brand as well as your follower’s loyalty. If you point a reader to an external source that is truly relevant and beneficial to them, the amount of trust that individual has in you will increase” (How).

Not surprisingly there are some limitations to retweeting.  When Twitter was created they established a 140 character maximum.  That means that a user cannot create a tweet over140 characters long.  This creates problems when people try to retweet because users are expected to include their id in the retweet so other users know where the retweet came from.  Users cannot legitimately retweet the same exact tweet with their id included because it usually does not fit within the 140 character limit.  To alleviate this problem users are forced to delete content or shorten words from the message they are retweeting.  This of course has ramifications, in that; the original content runs the risk of being distorted by the retweeting user and the original author of the message is sometime misinterpreted because of the missing content.  Scholars have found that there are two types of people who retweet and they are called “preservers” and “adapters” (Boyd, Golder, Lotan).  A preserver is a “person who emphasizes in maintaining the original intent, context, and content of the message” and an adapter is someone who is “willing to remove various parts of the tweet to suit their own purposes” (Boyd, Golder, Lotan). In addition retweeting can create ambiguities, in that, when a message is retweeted the authorship changes and adds ambiguity to the tweet because “who is the “I” in a retweet? Is it the retweeter, or the retweeted” (Boyd, Golder, Lotan).

  
In exploring the role that Twitter plays in global communication students at The University of Iowa targeted different case studies to discover the effects of communication and its relationship to Twitter.  Currently, there have been two rounds of studies.  The first batch of studies at the beginning of the semester included a in depth look on five different issues, they were Somalia, Bin Laden, Venezuela and Russia arms deal, Iran Nuclear disarmament and Violence in Gaza.  All the groups received significant amount of communication and data surrounding their events.

At the beginning of the semester Bin Laden released a tape worldwide that made brash remarks about President Barack Obama being powerless.  The result of this was a high level of communication on twitter and around the globe.  They received 1,661 total tweets that don’t include any specific symbols, but if we include the total level of data, the number is 7,201.  Their total number of RT amounted to 1,109, which is 34% of the total.
The group, who looked into the crisis in Somalia, gathered 1,501 total tweets.  This event was triggered throughout the media by the death of terrorist, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in Somalia and then a shooting at a medical clinic triggered by terrorist group Al Qaida.  In the table above, one could see the amount @ signs, #, Retweets and URL’s accumulated from the data received.  In total accounting the tweets and symbols, the amount received was 4,108 and 57% of total tweets were users who retweeted.

Recently Russia and Venezula has been in agreement with the distribution of arms.  Venezuela received the right to purchase a major amount of rockets and ammunition from Russia.  The major amount of global communication occurred between September 10th and September 23rd.  They received 3,216 total tweets and received 1,190 @ signs, 599 hash tags, 1,109 retweets and 1,087 URL’s from archivist.  Another data figure we received was that 24% of total tweets were retweets.

Similarly to Russia and Venezuala, the news story about Iran involves a story about weapons.  They shot off nuclear missiles on September 28, 2009 towards other countries to give a warning that they have weapons of mass destruction.  In total, including #’s, URL’s, RT and @ sign, their tweet total amounts to 2,886.  The percentage of retweets to the total amount is 34%.

The most recent reports that were produced focused on the issue of retweeting.  These reports included a look into the 2016 Olympics, Philippine Flooding, Indonesian Earthquake, and an Iran Missile Crisis.

In the Indonesian earthquake report, this group reported that they collected a total of 3,637 tweets over the course of their research.  They received tweets from many different news organizations like Alertnet and the JakartaGlobe, an organization out of Indonesia.  In total because of the amount of global communication surrounding the event they received 709 @ signs, which is a result of referencing another user.  The # sign is a tag on twitter to show how much users are interested in the topic, the total for this data is 309.  In total the group who researched the Indonesia Earthquake had a total number of tweets and symbols including URL’s were 8,464.  At the end of this project, they found that their retweets total amounted to 54% of total tweets.  This number shows the high level of retweets compared to original tweets.  A research project similar to this one was another groups, they did the Philippine Floods event.

In the Philippine floods report, the group gathered information from CNN and The New York Times to learn more about the events surrounding the flood.  This flood occurred on September 27th around the Philippines, which was the effect of Tropical Storm Ondoy releasing its energy of the storm on the land.  In this report they used both Archivist and Trendistic to find varying trends about the level of communication surrounding this event.  In total they received 3,806 tweets, but their search terms differed.  They searched three different words; Philippines, Philippine Flood and Philippines typhoon, the received the most search results from ‘Philippines’ but ‘Philippines Typhoon’ was a close second with 1502 total tweets.   Their retweets totals were RT 554 messages, but because of the search terms they used they divided the data into three different columns.  I have just combined these totals in the table below to make it easier for users to see as the project as a whole.

One other report that received a lot of tweets was the 2016 Olympic bid event.  This event was a global not only because the Olympics are a global competition but also the sites were in 4 different continents; Chicago, Illinois, Madrid, Spain, Tokyo, Japan and Rio de Janiero, Brazil.  In total they accounted a remarkable 25,781 total tweets through the course of their research.  This statistic is a result of the extraordinary high level of communication around this event.  When they uploaded their information to excel they found that they had 6,245 @ signs and 3,423 #’s.  They also had 12, 007 URL’s in their data.  They also found a high level of retweets accounting to 13% of total tweets.  This high level of data shows the high level of communication surrounding this event.

The final report of the second time through researched Iran Missiles, which was an event instigated by nuclear testing and there were people who deeply opposed this action.  In total they received 1,661 total tweets that don’t include any specific symbols.  By including things like #’s, URL and @ symbols their project total jumps to 4,312.  Their total level of retweets amounted to 33% of total tweets.

In examining the latest round of reports, which focused on retweeting, one strong idea arose, that is, that most of the messages were retweeted by various individuals, but the messages themselves originated from major news sources such as CNN, BreakingNews, and ABC or major organizations like the Red Cross or the Disaster Emergency Committee, certain relief services, and several non-profit organizations that aid the cause being tweeted about.   What is interesting about this is that it allows the most important messages to reach around the globe while weeding out unimportant or useless tweets.  When the same main message gets retweeted repeatedly, more people see that message and focus on it.  This allows major issues and announcements to spread quickly.  Another point about these retweets is that the major news sources and organizations are almost always American or, when they are not, they are English speaking. This is surprising since all of the issues that were reported on had an international focus and many of the countries spoken about do not have English as their primary language. There was evidence of tweets in another language in all of the reports, but foreign languages were not present in the retweets.  From this we can conclude that the majority of the users speak English and/or get their news from American sources.  This is not to say that the tweeters are all American.  There are many countries and people around the world that speak English and use it as a method of communication.  It can also be concluded that the original tweeters wanted the message to reach as many people as possible and thought that using English would aid in satisfying this want. 

It is interesting to note the variation that occurs among the percentage of retweets about various issues.  Issues calling for aid have a much higher percentage of retweets (Earthquake 54% and Somalia 57%) than other issues (Olympics 13%).  This shows that people use retweeting to support a cause and get the message to the most users possible.
In conclusion, retweeting aided in making the communication global by spreading the word about the issue or cause.  In the case of a problematic issue, many of the retweets were asking for donations or calling for help.  When it came to non-problematic issues, such as the Olympic Bid, most of the retweets were messages commenting on the outcome- either congratulatory or disapproving.  A majority of the retweets for all of the issues involved a message of solidarity.  For example, with the Philippine flooding a large number of retweets asked for money and support of the cause.  The same is true of the Iran Missile Crisis,   the Iran Nuclear weapon issue, and the Indonesian earthquake.  Overall, retweeting allows the communication to reach across many countries and cultures which spreads the word more quickly and makes the communication global.

Works Cited

Boyd, Danah, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan. "Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter." Danah.org. 30 Oct. 2009 <www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf>.

Grossman, Lev. "Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement - TIME." Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com. N.p., 17 June 2009. Web. 6 Nov. 2009. <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html>

Heil, Bill and Mikolaj, Piskorski. "New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org." Voices - HarvardBusiness.org. Havard Business, 1 June 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2009. <http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html>

"How to Retweet: A Simple Guide." Blog writing, marketing, and design - Blogging Bits. N.p., 17 Aug. 2008. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.  <http://bloggingbits.com/the-art-and-science-of-retweeting-for-twitteraholics/>

MacManus, Richard. "Emerging Internet Trends: An Analysis of Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit Presentation." ReadWriteWeb - Web Apps, Web Technology Trends, Social Networking and Social Media. N.p., 21 Oct. 2009. Web. 13 Nov. 2009. <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/emerging_internet_trends_meeke