The evil twins of global popular culture: bin Laden and Hitler

The joke goes like this

If I had a gun with two bullets and was in a room with bin Laden, Hitler and xxx I would shoot xxx twice.

The person sending the message gets to specify the target by filling in the xxx. The joke is long standing. It shows up among Twitter messages almost every day. Another favorite is recognizing bin Laden as the world's champion at hide and seek.

I have been following messages about bin Laden for some time. The pattern is displayed in this figure.

The figure is Twitter messages per day from September 6 through midday October 28, 2010. The number of messages per day are generally in the range between 1,000 and 2,000. But on days when bin Laden makes a move messaging is propelled upward. The spike for 9/11 is clearly visible. The highest peak was reaction to bin Laden's tape calling for nations to take improving the environment more seriously. The most recent peak, October 27, was when bin Laden threatened the French because of their law making burqas illegal. The peaks are easy. It is the one to two thousand messages every day that are interesting just because they are a mystery.

I have not been following Twitter messages about Hitler so I will use counts from Trendistic.

Trendistic displays Twitter messages as a percentage of the total flow; the total flow is now estimated to be about 65 million a day. When the percentage falls below 0.01% they do not display that. This figure is for three months. At 9/11 messages using 'Hitler' dropped below their minimal criterion, which is, obviously, quite different from the bin Laden stream. The messages peaked in the last third of September, the first third of October and the last third of October.

The counting procedure is different between the two message streams. Messages containing Hitler are substantially more frequent than messages containing bin Laden. On the days the Hitler trend is shown in the figure there are three or four times as many message containing Hitler as containing bin Laden except for the spike at October 1 when the bin Laden stream is more tweets than at any point for the Hitler stream.

Hitler and bin Laden are firmly established figures in the emerging global culture. One way to note this is by examining the languages used. I selected 4,000 messages from each stream; all of the messages including Hitler or Nazis were from October 27 and the messages containing bin Laden were from October 24 through the 26th. The most recent account of messages per language was research done in the spring of 2010, and that research will be compared to these distributions [ViralBlog May 10, 2010]. Identification of the language of Twitter messages was done with a Google Spreadsheet function. It is not one hundred percent accurate.

The estimate of languages used in the spring of 2010 are the lightest bars in the chart. English is used in somewhat fewer messages in the two political streams than was found for all messaging -- 58% and 53% compared to 61%. Portuguese is the second language of the web, and it was even more frequently used in the bin Laden and Hitler/Nazi streams than for all messages -- 23% for bin Laden and 26% for Hitler/Nazi compared to 11% overall. Japanese did not appear in the two political streams. Spanish is more frequently found in bin Laden, 7%, and Hitler/Nazi, 10%, than in the stream of all messages, 4%. Other was greater for all messages (18%) than for bin Laden (12%) or Hitler/Nazi (10%).

Global -- English appears somewhat less in the two political streams than for all tweets, and that means there is greater diversity of language use in these two political streams. Most of the spread seems to have gone to Portuguese and Spanish; both are more frequently used in the two political streams than in the all messages data. I wanted to look specifically at German given the connection of the messages to their past. Four percent of the bin Laden messages were in German, and 2% of the Hitler/Nazi messages were German. Japanese is missing from the political messages; there are no messages Google identifies as in Japanese. There are other Asian languages identified, but they are few in number.

Global for bin Laden and Hitler/Nazi may be western culture.

What kind of messages make up these streams? One way to answer the question is by looking at the messages that appeared frequently, and the starting place for such analysis is retweeting. Retweeting takes the form RT @[author name] [original message]. It is, effectively, quoting with attribution. It is passing the message one just read to friends, followers, or anyone who comes across it. And Twitter has made it easy to do; you just click on a 'button.'

The number of messages that are retweeted once or more is 350 for the bin Laden stream and 356 for the Hitler/Nazi stream. That is remarkably similar. However, there is a substantial difference in the total number of retweets for the 350/356 original messages. The total number of retweets in the bin Laden stream was 1980 for an average of 5.7 tweets per original message. The number of retweets for the Hitler/Nazi stream was only 1166 for an average of 3.3 tweets per original message. If you add the original messages to the number of retweets the number of messages appearing more than once is 2,330 for bin Laden and 1,522 for Hitler/Nazi out of a total of 4,000 for each. This is the lower bound of repetition since messages could be repeated without utilizing RT @, which was the search term used to find duplicates. But there is clearly more aggregation of messages in the bin Laden stream.

What did they have to say? The dominant retweeted message in the bin Laden stream is:

RT @BorowitzReport: If we used the same energy we put into spotting Jake Gyllenhaal with Taylor Swift, we'd have bin Laden by now.

That message appeared 831 times. Borowitz is a New York comedian who does comedy on Twitter at 140 characters per laugh. This is intended to be funny, and like all jokes it assumes you know who and what. This is the ABC News entertainment webpage version of the search he is spoofing.

Nine Theories on Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal's Relationship. Why Might Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal Be Together?

by Kate Torgovnick, The Frisky.com

The interwebs are abuzz with the promise of a new potential couple: Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal . . .

Two 'stars.' A new relationship that is semi secret. And nine theories for the abuzz. That is good enough to spark quite substantial retweeting as well as the original joke.

The leading retweet in this 4,000 Hitler/Nazi stream of messages is:

Boehner ( @GOPLeader) to Headline Weekend Rally with Nazi Reenactor Iott http://bit.ly/9Ir3Vj

That is the simplest version of the retweet. It took a number of related forms rather than being simply quoted. Other versions include

RT @JoshuaGreen Boehner's got some stones Spokesman says Damn right he's campaigning for Iott (see UPDATE) http://bit.ly/9q6bUA (expand) #p2

RT @HuffPostPol: John Boehner to campaign for Rich Iott, House candidate who dressed up as Nazi. http://huff.to/bHdx7X

RT @PoliCorr Rep. Boehner To Rally For GOP Nazi Impersonator Rich Iott http://ow.ly/19FNEq

RT @Ann7837: @joshtpm Boehner has to rally the Nazi wing of the GOP, you betcha.

I particularly like the Democrats' take on this.

The DCCC's Ryan Rudominer says, "Not only has John Boehner recruited, embraced, and financed a disgraced Nazi enthusiast running for Congress, but now Boehner is pouring gasoline on the fire by holding a campaign rally with him. Unbelievably, this comes on the heels of John Boehner also embracing an Ohio congressional candidate being sued for attempted rape and sexual assault, and another who has ties to an organized crime syndicate that brands women like cattle.Thumbing his nose at our nation's veterans, women, and people of the Jewish faith, all the while refusing to stand up for basic American values in order to try and win an election, apparently this is what Boehner meant when he said, "We're not going to be any different than what we've been." [Joshua Green, The Atlantic]

I take it in reenacting World War II no one is supposed to pose as a Nazi. OK, it just seems close to pure partisan extract from context and give the worst possible twist to the matter. Or maybe Mr. Iott really is a latter day Nazi. I have no idea and no way to know.

Appropriate to the day, more precisely the day before, is "RT @jimmycarr: I'm so excited about Halloween tomorrow. I'm going as a Stormtrooper & really what could be scarier than a Space Nazi?" What could be scarier, indeed? Halloween was the subject of more than 300 twitter messages in the days leading up to Halloween.

These are not messages about bin Laden and Hitler. They are messages about events of the day in which bin Laden and Hitler are used as a foil to produce contrast of one sort or another. They participate in this communication as the dominant evil of the 20th century and the dominent evil of the 21st century. And most of the time their role is to be the evil foil in a comedy. What one sees in these streams is the emergence of a global political popular culture. They are icons of evil spread widely through global communication. We have had a global popular culture for blue jeans and American movies since World War II. With a new technology of communication open to everyone a next step in global culture is upon us.

G. R. Boynton,
November 1, 2010

Two more for the fun of it.

RT @BorowitzReport in New Tape, Bin Laden 'Furious' That Brian Wilson Has Scarier Beard #STGiants 10/28/2010

RT @S_SylvesterGlee: Bin Laden sent France a threatening video, but the one he sent me was much scarier. It was him trying to sing "Teenage Dream".