Sunshine 🍊☀️🍊 is the cure 🍊

Ok crazy election theory time. So I have an idea about what happened on Tuesday. Hopefully most of you have seen the extremely unusual numbers by now and see that many counties across the country flip blue has a less than 0.1% statistical chance of happening. Elon once said “Twitter is a crime scene”. My theory would fold into that I think. It comes down to what was available on Twitter back in the day - which was free streaming of almost anything you wanted to see. Anyone could FOR FREE get instant access to a feed of millions of posts based on usernames, keywords - basically you could tune this feed for whatever you wanted (including hashtags). However The free real-time streaming access that existed in 2020 is gone. Elon ended it in 2023. Back then: • Twitter’s Firehose (the full real-time feed) and the filtered streams basically dumped matching public tweets almost as soon as people posted them. You could set keywords or rules and get the stuff right away. • Researchers were already doing exactly this on Election Day. One team ran a live monitor with the streaming API on election/voting keywords, pinned the locations, and updated their site every 15 minutes. They said crowd-sourced tweets were a solid way to catch issues in real time. Now: There’s no free Streaming API or free filtered stream for regular users. Everything is pay-per-use ($0.005 per post you receive), hard-capped at 3 million posts per month on the self-serve plan, and full Firehose-style access is Enterprise-only with custom (expensive) pricing. The kind of free, near-instant keyword monitoring people could run on Election Day 2020 is no longer available. So in 2020 with a proper team it would be easy to watch for specific things, possibly even specific accounts and hashtags and help coordinate things like shutting counting down in a bunch of states because of realtime access to the state of things. Fast forward to 2024 - no realtime access, no keyword filters. The election looks “a bit more normal”. Without access to a realtime feed the cheaters had to guess and it would appear they guessed wrong. This time around it would appear that they applied a massive number shift everywhere of a specific percentage. The analysis I’ve seen so far puts that number somewhere between 15 and 20%. Like I said this is just a theory because I don’t have access to actual vote tabulators or ballot counts. I sure hope someone who does have that kind of access is looking at all this.