A New Service Has Been Set Up To Determine Whether Your Tweets Are Sexist Or Not And You’re Probably A Sexist According To Their Criteria

It seems like everyone has a Twitter account these days. Even if you don’t tweet that often it’s a pretty good way to get news that you’re actually interested in and it’s also great to look at all the stupid stuff that celebrities – mainly footballers – are doing right now, like going to Nando’s (Nile Ranger) or telling their mommys how much they love them, even when they don’t have twitter (Carlton Cole).

I’ve got a Twitter account (timw_brap, duh) but I don’t use it that often – when I do though it’s usually to say something really profound though, trust me – but I do use it to get a lot of information every day in my feed. As such, I’ve never really thought about whether I was particularly sexist in my tweets or not. Has anyone ever really thought about whether tweets are sexist or not though?

Probably not, except for all those feminists out there – one of which is probably the British writer and activist Joan Smith who has partnered with the Swedish organisation Crossing Borders to create this service called Twee-Q. It looks over your last 100 tweets and determines how many of your retweets have been of male and female users, which subsequently determines whether you’re a sexist or not.

Apparently sexism is defined by who you retweet. I’m not sure about that but you know I don’t want to get into a feminist/sexist argument and get completely trolled so I”ll just be quiet about my misgivings behind the science of Twee-Q. To be honest right now it’s only in its infancy so I don’t even know accurate it would be anyway even despite this simplification of sexism, as they’re only comparing the names of retweets against names in the Swedish and United States censuses which isn’t exactly a huge pool of names.

Twee-Q themselves have already reported that the data they’ve accumulated so far seems to be slight skewed – 28K people have had their tweets analysed so far with the average score being 4.9 (a perfect score is 10, meaning an exactly equal male to female retweet distribution) even though there’s a 2:1 ratio of men to women on Twitter.

I guess we can only wait to see in the future if this service gets any better. Of course, I’m probably only criticising it because I got such a lousy score of 2 which pretty much means I’m a sexist, at least judging by the amount of people I retweet. I tend to only retweet footballers who say dumb things on their Twitter accounts though, so if that makes me a sexist I guess I am. Would I be more or less of a sexist if I just retweeted dumb stuff that females said? Because I would then be making fun of females (sexist) but also retweeting them more (apparently not sexist). Bit of a catch 22 there huh?

If you want to vist Twee-Q yourself check it out here, but it’s probably just going to tell you that you’re a sexist even though you’re not. You can check out my result in the top image, if you didn’t figure that out yet.