You're probably right that she's too dumb to not realize how small her base actually is. All those Twitter likes aren't people who can or will vote in New York state Democratic primaries, let alone primaries all over the country.
That's the beautiful thing about statistics and numbers too large to conceptualize or contextualize and how they can be used to lie and make things seem like a much larger deal and more representative than they are. Take a look at all of the tweets that AOC makes, the number of likes is the most useful metric we can use here because it's a low commitment way to interact with her on the Twitter platform (more than replying because that requires thought and intent, and more than retweeting because there is a choice involved, retweet or quote tweet).
Let's go with a recent tweet that has high engagement due to invective language, something that AOC is very good at utilizing to prop interactions:
Wow, 72.5k, that's a lot of people, right? Especially if we assume those are all actual people and not robits. But let's put this into context.
The current population of the world is 7.75B, so if we take that into account, we see that 72.5k, or 0.00013% of the total population of Earth.
Using this number would be disingenuous, though because not all people of the world have internet. In fact, only about 63% of the world's population is currently online. So let's take the total internet using population of the world: 4,882,500,000, rounding to 4.88B for simplicity's sake: 0.0014%! Wow, big gains!
How about Twitter users in the world? (72,500/450,000,000)*100 = 0.016%. Even on Twitter she's largely ignored.
But wait, AOC doesn't preside over the world, regardless of how much her dumb thoughts are broadcast to the entire population of the world, so we're going to have to pare that down. Let's just move to the number of internet using people in the USA. 312.3M users: 0.023%. We're getting closer to significance.
How about New York state? Keeping the roughly 90% of total population for internet users in America going forward, again for simplicity, we have 17.5M: 0.41%. Still basically nothing.
90% of New York City? 7.5M gives us 0.96%. We're almost to 1%!
Alright, let's go further: The Bronx? 1.2M gives us 6%!
New York's 14th Congressional District? Let's be generous and say the entirety of its population of 696,664 has internet access and all of the people interacting with this post are from there: 10.4% of her district agrees with her.
That wouldn't get you re-elected.
Now this is just a thought experiment because I find it fascinating what this kind of shit from social media can do to people's brain meats, but the fact of the matter is this: People have trouble conceptualizing large numbers. This phenomenon is even in the APA dictionary of psychology as
The Law of Large Numbers. If you throw a large enough number at the average person who doesn't know jack or shit about statistics or scaling, over 1,000 I believe, they see that number and think one of two things:
My opinion is validated because everyone agrees with me
-or-
Everyone else is stupid because they do not agree with me
If we all just understood that no one is paying any attention to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or any of these fucking social media platforms, and that our numbers back that up, we'd be a lot less divided and stupid all the time. Social media is a poison
chiefly because it uses numbers too large for humans to quantify and psychologically damages everyone from that misunderstanding alone.
By the way, as an addendum, just for funski, let's see how much of RetardEra agrees with the average Sandy Twit based on their total userbase from the most recent reporting, March 2021: (72,500/53,000)*100 = 136%!!
Everything kind of makes sense, now, doesn't it?
