Via slashdot:
Twitter does shape public opinion, but not in a way that favors individual thought or intellectual diversity, according to a quantitative study of six months’ worth of Tweets.
Twitter, whose 241 million users send an immense number of messages per day, responds quickly to new events and often shows wide diversity of opinions about new events, according to Fei Xion, lecturer at Beijing Jiatong University in China, whose research team collected 6 million Tweets posted during the first half of 2011 to identify how opinions in them changed over time.
The team sorted Tweets according to topics in...
