This really tickles me this idea that Twitter tells us anything about what the majority of UK residents think.
Please forgive me the derail, but this belief is one of the issues we have in this debate - everyone on Twitter agrees with X, therefore X is what everyone thinks.
The latest stats on UK Twitter show that 25 out of a 100 people use Twitter and of those 25 only 10 are female.
So for starters, no more than one in five women use the platform.
Of course, the stats are based on counting accounts. Aside from bot accounts (computers tweeting programmed responses), troll or sock puppet accounts (fake accounts intended to stir up things) and farm accounts (where people are paid to tweet from many different accounts for various reasons, including commercial interests and political lobbying), very many people have more than one account. Including me.
There's often no overlap between the accounts - I had two for different aspects of my life. Like many others, my accounts are dormant. (Ever since I was suspended for pointing out that it was rather self-serving for males to declare that the female sex class cannot be oppressed by the male sex class because sex doesn't exist.)
That was two-and-a-half years ago. Both accounts still exist though. As do hundreds of thousands of other dormant accounts. Many more accounts tweet only rarely.
So the number of unique users who are active on Twitter is probably closer to 1 in 100 of people in the UK and therefore only 1 in 50 women. But I'm amused and feeling generous, so let's go with 1 in 5 women using the platform.
That's still 6.6 million accounts. But BilindaB has determined that only two to three thousand of them could possibly oppose the doctrine of gender identity.
I'd love to know how.
Anyway, the demographics tells us that the 15 to 24 age bracket is overrepresented. They represent 12% of the population but a third of Twitter users. Educated people are also overrepresented. People without qualifications are hugely underrepresented. People with higher incomes are also overrepresented. Working class people are underrepresented. Politically engaged people are overrepresented. People with liberal views are overrepresented.
And so on. Twitter users are not representative of the wider population.
Much more representative are polls done over the last few years which consistently showed that only 1 in 5 people support GRA reform, and in polls where the meaning and consequences of the proposed changes are pointed out (fully intact males using female-only provisions) a majority of men and women reject the notion. Even the Pink News poll showed the same results.
As for BilindaB's claim that follower numbers of grassroots women's rights groups can be discounted as they're probably paid-for fake followers, this is complete nonsense. These groups are funded by thousands of small donations. They publish their accounts. There's no money in the budget for buying followers or likes.
However, you don't have to trust follower numbers alone. A good indicator for genuine engagement are likes, retweet and comments.
BBC Breaking News has the most followers on UK Twitter with 48 million. Their highest engagement number recently was 1 in 2,000. Their average is about 1 in 10,000. But that is an account that only broadcasts.
From my marketing work, I would expect about 1 in 100 followers to interact with an account on any given tweet. (That's an average open-rate for emails as well and politicians as well as political researchers and admins tell us that in their view 1 letter represents at least 100 constituents with the same issue.)
So 1 in 100 then.
Take For Women Scotland's Twitteraccount. Their proportional engagement numbers are much better than those of BBC Breaking News, but that's because they don't just broadcast to Twitter users, they engage with them.
They have 20,000 followers and their best response rate is about 1 in 20. Their average response rate is around 1 in 200. What this means is that their follower numbers are not inflated by accounts that aren't genuine.
So applying this knowledge and taking BelindaB's figures at face value, 2,000 accounts actively engaging on Twitter to oppose the doctrine of gender identity represents about 200,000 users on Twitter who also oppose the doctrine of gender identity. That number doesn't really translate to real life, because believers in the doctrine are overrepresented on Twitter, but at the very least we can speculate that in real life there are more than 200,000 women in the UK who know about and oppose the doctrine of gender identity.
Of course, the judge in the Maya Forstater ruling already confirmed what we know - believing that sex is binary and immutable is a view held by the majority of the people. And if Twitter has given someone the impression that the majority of UK residents think people can change sex and TWAW, then Twitter has given them the wrong impression.
Again, sorry for the derail.