What would happen if twitter sent consequential messages to only a strategically important subset of users? A quantification of the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME)
Fig 1
A screenshot showing an image of the first and second tweets in the Twitter feed employed in Experiment 1.
The first tweet was a targeted message coming presumably from the Twitter company itself, in this case containing positive information about Bill Shorten. It would thus have been shown to study participants in the Pro-Shorten bias group. Its format was low-contrast (white background, with a black “Breaking News” headline) and included a blue checkmark, signifying verification. The second tweet in the image was an organic tweet sent by a fictitious user.