Miley Cyrus Rules Twitter: Twerking Trumps Syria

Long, long ago, the news didn’t used to be real until Walter Cronkite said it was. Nowadays, it’s often real at least as news before it even happens: See the Wikipedia entry for “WMDs” or just Google “Brangelina Wedding” for further details.
And anything on Twitter is de facto news. Remember, communications theory defines information as “anything which is communicated,” no matter how meaningless it may be. Oh, and it is.
They used to say “if it bleeds, it leads,” but as the Twitter stats of the past few days have shown us, that’s no longer the case. This graph compares the Twitter mentions of the escalating civil war in #Syria with mentions of #Twerk. Click and prepare to be disappointed by humanity.
We may soon be at war in Syria, fighting on the side of the revolutionaries of the Free Syrian Army against the forces of Bashar al-Assad. But while that’s on the minds of military personnel and politicians, it’s apparently not winning the battle for mindshare among the American public. #Syria has consistently been out-tweeted by #twerk, the bum-waggling dance move that is the favorite of attention seekers from the Junior Prom to the VMAs.
Amid fresh accusations of chemical weapons attacks and increasing calls in the media for the US to step in to the conflict, #Syria out-performed #Twerk for four straight days.
Then Miley happened.
As chronicled by Jared Keller of Al-Jazeera and retweeted by Blake Hounshell of Politico, Twerk trashed Syria up until everyone was sick of discussing the pop starlet’s latex-clad antics at the VMAs and the pendulum swung.
The Twerk Effect is so strong that a new Tumblr has emerged, Miley Twerking On Things We Should Care About, the ultimate infotainment pandering site. But hey, if it works…
Now, two days later, as war (intervention, action, conflict, surgical strike, incident, escalation…) with Syria seems more and more certain, Twitter users have at last come around to discussing what used to be called “hard news.” Because I guess it’s hard.
Too hard for some. There was a significant sub-group who fought their own battle of tweets, doggedly firing misguided spelling “corrections” at Spanish speakers using the #Siria tag. One of the funniest things on twitter: English speakers explaining to Spanish speakers that#Siria is spelled #Syria.
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