Top trends of 2022? There are plenty of political and religion stories in these tweets — GetReligion
1. What happened in the 1990s?!?
Between 1991 and 1998, the share of young people who identified as Christians dropped by 14 percentage points, while the share who said that they had no religious affiliation rose by 12 points. It’s the largest shift in religious affiliation in the last 50 years, as far as I can tell.
This graph turned into a much longer exposition at Religion News Service, where I try to make sense of that happened in that time period. I don’t know if I was able to fully grapple with all the societal shifts during the early 1990s, but it’s something that I am thinking about a lot more as time passes. Hopefully it will become part of a book length project at some point.
In conclusion, sometimes people ask me what it takes for a tweet to go viral. I think that if anyone would know how to answer that question it would be me.
Honestly, I have no idea.
I’ve sent out graphs that I thought were just terrific. Then they went nowhere. Some of the graphs that get hundreds of retweets aren’t even that good, to be honest. My best advice is that it’s just a numbers game.
The marginal cost of sending out more content is basically zero (besides the time it takes to produce a graph). So, there’s not a real downside to trying different things out. Who knows if Twitter will still exist in its current form a year from now, but hopefully we can do this again in December of 2023.
