When we think of a social network where we can inform us about what is happening in the world, the answer is quite simple. And this is the case for over one in two Italians: in almost 60% of cases, Twitter is the social space by definition when it comes to finding news or resources to learn more about any topic.
And in fact, unlike for example Facebook, Twitter looks more like a information network. In other words, a space in which relationships are built (when they are built) not on the basis of knowledge or social interactions, but on the basis of common interests. The functioning of the social network created by Jack Dorsey, moreover, is clear: you subscribe and choose who to follow, based on the content we are interested in and not, generally, on the direct knowledge of the user.
Social network
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As for the organization of information, Twitter, as well as all other digital spaces, uses an algorithm that organizes tweets based on the user’s interests. In general, the social network tends to show more people content that:
- they receive a high number of interactions, preferably in a short time;
- they are published by profiles with which the user has already interacted in the past;
- they concern keywords – or hashtags – in which the user has in some way shown interest;
- they are recent.
This organization, managed by artificial intelligence, can have unexpected consequences. Twitter itself, a few months ago, had published a research in which it stated how its algorithm amplified more content coming from a right-wing political area.
Claiming the user agency: advanced search
What can we do, as users, to avoid falling victim to unexpected consequences, perhaps of fake news amplified by the algorithm just because they collect so many interactions? We can exercise what research calls user agencythat is the ability of users to exploit the tools made available by the platforms to recover centrality, to claim a power of choice.
In this sense, Twitter offers users a very powerful tool for finding information: advanced search. In the desktop version, to use all the features in a simple and guided way, just carry out a search and, on the results page, select ‘Advanced search’ on the top bar on the right. From here, you can search for content with greater precision, choosing the source, the hashtag to consider or the words to exclude.
From application, the game is a bit more complicated. After clicking on the magnifying glass at the bottom, to filter the tweets you need a series of Boolean operators, which allow you to search with the same accuracy as the desktop version: we have collected 5 for you, starting from an interesting thread by US expert Tessa Davis.
1. How to find a tweet from a particular person
Are you interested in knowing the latest content published by Italian.Tech? Just type the Boolean operator ‘from:’, followed by the profile you are interested in, in our case @ITItalianTech. And if you want to check which tweets Italian.Tech has sent, for example, to the newspaper La Stampa, just add the operator ‘to:’ to the previous search, followed by the username you are interested in, in this case @LaStampa.
2. How to find a tweet on a specific topic
And if you want to go one step further and find all the tweets from a particular profile on a particular topic, there is another interesting feature. Let’s stick to the example of Italian.Tech: we want to find the contents published by our newspaper profile on the Twitter theme. Just type ‘from: @ITItalianTech Twitter’.
If you want an even more precise search, you can also add the Boolean operator ‘-‘, which is used to exclude a keyword from the results. In our case, perhaps, we are interested in the fate of the social network but we are of little interest to the new shareholder Elon Musk: in that case we will type ‘from: @ITItalianTech Twitter -Elon Musk’.
3. How to find popular tweets
Another possibility is to search for popular posts. For example, let’s imagine we want to retrieve a tweet that was very successful, but without remembering the publication date or the profile that shared it. We can search by keyword or by profile, adding the operators ‘min_retweets: x’, ‘min_faves: x’ (like), ‘min_replies: x’ (answers).
Thanks to this research, for example, it can be found that only 3 tweets from Elon Musk received over 100,000 retweets.
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4. How to find tweets by format or place of publication
To be even more specific, you can apply filters to your search. It can be done by type of format, then links, images or videos, or by place of publication.
In the first case, just add the ‘filter:’ operator, followed by links, images and media (which stands for photos and videos); in the second, you can enter ‘near:’ in the search bar.
5. How to find a tweet posted at a specific time
The last of the advanced search tricks that we propose can be very useful in identifying useful content in the event of a news being updated. This is the time frame filter, which is obtained by adding the operators ‘since:’ for the beginning and ‘until’ for the end to the search key. The only precaution in this case is to remember to insert the date in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
