Wired has an article on how scientists are trying to use Twitter to measure the gravity of earthquakes.  To support their thesis they published this graph…

They then state this conclusion a little lower in the article (bold added by me)…

It turns out that the “Earthquake! Earthquake!” SOS that you tweet, aggregated with thousands of others, provides an excellent indication of the strength and severity of a quake. A little rumbler yields just a small spike, while a strong quake produces a huge spike in Twitter activity, as seen in the graph above.

Now look back at the graph and notice a few things.

1.  A 5.1 Quake in Costa Rica creates more traffic than an 8.1 in Samoa

2.  “The Great California ShakeOut” which was just a large earthquake drill created more activity than the 7.6/7.8 in Vanuatu and the 8.1 in Samoa

3.  A 3.7 quake in Pleasanton creates more traffic than a 6.6 in Sumatra

And so on…

I’ve pretty much given up on fighting Twitter hype but in this case I couldn’t resist because they were literally pointing to a graph that didn’t support their thesis and claiming it did.  I mean, it takes some serious  cognitive dissonance to say “as seen in the graph above” and then point to a graph that doesn’t show what you’re claiming it does. 

Of course they could argue that spikes within an area tells you something (e.g. Pleasanton’s 3.7 might rank higher than Sumatra’s 6.6 but a 6.6 in Pleasanton would rank higher than the 3.7).  But even that doesn’t track because that would only be useful if the jump was proportional.

In other words the 7.5 quake in Sumatra caused a spike at least 3 times larger than the 6.6 (the graph is clipped so it might have even been larger than that).  So I can’t see how that would be “an excellent indication of the strength and severity of a quake” as the author claimed.

As I’ve said before I’m not against twitter.  It’s a nice little services for those who enjoy that sort of thing.  But people who insist on trying to make it more than that are just fooling themselves.