New Research Quantifies the Emotional Energy Bound Up in Twitter Mobs

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Based on my experience, supplemented by careful and rigorous record-keeping, I have constructed an equation that describes the amount of emotional energy contained in various forms of impersonal nastiness:

In English: One nasty phone call is the equivalent of 50 nasty emails or 2,500 nasty tweets. Basically, a nasty tweet is all but meaningless. The bandwagon effect is so powerful on weak minds, and the effort required is so minuscule, that an outraged tweet is equivalent to only a tiny fraction of a nasty phone call. Nasty emails are somewhere in between. Keep this in mind if you ever get a barrage of nasty tweets.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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