Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

by Tim Harford

In contrast Ferguson did trend widely on Twitter, which posts an unfiltered feed and offers ‘retweets’ instead of ‘likes’. But the story here is not much more cheerful. Emma Pierson, a young statistician based at Oxford University, dug into the data and found that tweets about Ferguson were clearly divisible into two groups: the ‘blue tweets’, which claimed that Brown’s death was an outrage and the police response to protesters was oppressive, and the ‘red tweets’, which claimed that police officer Wilson was being scapegoated and the protesters were looters. (Many of the tweets made false claims, which were rapidly retweeted.) Pierson’s analysis showed that the two groups, with very different views of the world, barely interacted.