US President Barack Obama isn’t smarter than a seventh grader – on Twitter, at least!
Around 33 per cent of tweets are at a fourth grade reading level, according to a new tool that tells how smart or dumb your posts are on the micro-blogging site.
The test found that teen sensation Justin Bieber and pop star Lady Gaga tweet at fifth grade level, while Obama tweets like a seventh grader. According to TIME magazine’s analysis of one million public tweets, 33 per cent of tweets test at a fourth grade reading level.
The Twitter test relied upon a commonly used reading comprehension survey known as Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) to assess the complexity of messages sent on the micro-blogging site. ”Gobbledygook” is a word of three or more syllables.
The results show that most tweets require no more than a fourth grade education to comprehend.
“Although a tweet’s limit of 140 characters makes it difficult to compose a message at a higher reading level. But not impossible. This test did pick up a handful of 12th-grade tweets,” the report said.
Tweets were downloaded with the Twitter application programming interface (API) and run through a version of the SMOG test written for JavaScript.
PTI
