General Public vs. Twitter

An article I found on CNN discussed how Twitter opinions do not match the mainstream opinions. Pew Research Center conducted a year long study where they focused on political events such as the presidential election and presidential debates. Some of the differences they found from the general public's view to tweets was that Twitter was more liberal and always more negative. Some examples were from the first presidential debate and only 20% of the public thought Obama did a better job than Romney, but 59% of tweets favored him. Pew thinks that this is because most Twitter users are younger than 30 and are more likely to be Democrat. Also, the opinions about Senator John Kerry being nominated as Obama's secretary of state split the public 39% approved, 36% disapproved and 26% had no opinion. On Twitter 6% approved while 32% were negative and 62% expressed no opinion. From this, pew said that on Twitter users decide what they think is important enough mention publicly. An example of this is how nearly 14 million people tweeted about Obama's reelection while 70,000 commented on Kerry's nomination.
I think this article is important because it gives us statistics about how the general public views things and how Twitter users view things. The difference in opinion is mostly because of age difference. People who use Twitter are typically young and liberal and want to voice their opinions which are usually negative. Pew found that only 13% of adults use Twitter and only 3% say they tweet. The general public would mostly consist of 30-60 years old opinions. The opinions are also more negative on Twitter because it is easy to say what they think. The Twitter universe loves it when it's being mean to someone. I think this occurs because users are able to say what they want and no one can comment on it, they can only tweet back to them. Social media has spread the thoughts of different opinions everywhere most which are different from the general public and more negative. This article made me ask if opinions of the general public will change because of the use of Twitter.