God is following me on twitter!
The Discovery
A while back I was involved in a twitter conversation with a few friends about a petition to secularise Austria. The very minute I wrote a tweet containing the word “god”, my phone went crazy telling me about new followers just about every minute. At first I thought: “Cool, there seems to be a lot of interest in the topic!”. And then I learned a new hashtag: #tcot or Top Conservatives On Twitter.
“Whoa” I thought. “What the heck is happening here?” within 48 hours of writing “god” in a tweet I was being followed by scores of TCOT people. Now if I were also a member of the ultra-religious ultra-right ultra-conservative scene, I would probably have been excited to finally have made the connection to “my crowd” on twitter. But here’s the thing: I’m neither religious, nor conservative. In fact I am a staunch atheist! Not one of those that just neglects to go to church type atheists, but one that is actually vocal on atheism.
I’m one of those atheists that is a member of Think-Atheist, the social network for atheists. I’m one of those Atheists that is a member of AG-Athe, the Austrian Association for Secularism. If I never hear the words “god bless you” again, it would be a day too soon for me!
So being followed by the TCOT crowd, was like being under constant observation by the “enemy camp”. But then I am attempting to never tweet stuff that I would not tell my mom, my wife, and my boss anyhow. So it’s not that big of a deal. But it did get me thinking.
It seems like there are people out there doing twitter-searches on specific words they care about. Then these people band together to magnify their collective voices. So I decided to start a little experiment. I tweeted about how sad I was to have missed a Vodka-Party. And guess what, within minutes I had couple of new “Vodka Followers” with twitter-names like “vodkatwits” and “baconvodka”. (Now that’s my kind of people 
)
“Yes It Works!!!” I thought and went off to my think-tank to contemplate the implications of my new discovery. Now I realise that all of you experienced twits (or is that tweets? I can never keep it straight) already knew all of this, but it was new to me. So like a little boy that has discovered dad’s porn collection I started scheming on what my next step would be.
