Stupid Fight: Choose two Twitterers. See whose fans are dumber.

What’s this all about? FACT: A lot of people on Twitter are stupid. Many of these people follow celebrities and try to send them messages. But which celebrity’s fans are most stupid? It’s time to find out.

What do you mean by ‘stupid’? Stupid Fight can’t go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that’s sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation ‘OMG’? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.

How valid are Stupid Fight’s results? Like the Body Mass Index, it’s an excellent indicator but may not work for certain people. It is, for example, blind to irony. It may have issues with non-English languages. Its accuracy given one individual Twitter message, or one individual user, is quite low. On average, however, it’s not a bad test at all.

I’m a linguist, and I find your prescriptive approach to language unacceptable. I’m also a linguist, and I find your mum’s prescriptive approach to language unacceptable.

http://www.tomscott.com/stupidfight/#theonion-vs-cnnbrk

Nothing more needs to be said.