Yesterday, we published an item based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer’s claim that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers–a number that he’s taken to bragging about–in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! But today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich’s million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

Our source yesterday told us that about “80 percent of [Newt's followers] are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various ‘follow agencies’” paid by his campaign.

Ok, I admit it. I’m jealous that I didn’t think of running a Twitter account creation / retweeting astroturf operation of this scale before. Astroturfing a retweet campaign yes; wholesale Twitterbot campaign, no.

My response – sadly unsolicited by either Gladwell or TNY, but sent as a letter to the latter nonetheless – is below:

In “Small Change”, Malcolm Gladwell made what has become a fashionably contrarian claim: that social media’s contribution to activism has amounted to little more than “helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.”

And in some respects he’s right. Gladwell correctly identifies the “Twitter Revolutions” of Iran and Moldova as nothing of the kind. There is scant evidence that Twitter actually helped folks inside Iran or Moldova, as opposed to simply give CNN something to talk about. Closer to home, the unhappy truth is that millions of teenagers sending texts and $10 to Obama didn’t transform him into a latter-day F.D.R.

On the other hand, Gladwell ignores examples from Shirky’s book (which he cites for the phone example) that weaken his argument. Kate Hanni’s use of social media to organize disparate dissatisfied passengers into the collective FlyersRights.org was a driving force behind the Passenger’s Bill of Rights. Voice of the Faithful, the organization of lay Catholics which drove the torrid response to the 2002 sex abuse cases, relied on social media to expand beyond its Boston origins. And Wikicrimes, a site which began mapping experienced crimes and police corruption in Fortaleza, Brazil, allowed its citizens to challenge local authority and evade police brutality as they couldn’t before.

Gladwell is right that we shouldn’t confuse texts and tweets with boycotts and sit-ins. But the two need not be mutually exclusive. Two million people texting may not be as effective as two hundred people sitting at a counter – but if, out of the two million texts, two hundred people sit at a counter where they would not have done so before, nothing has been lost. Social media need not be a substitute for real activism – the two can, and do, complement each other.

Gladwell’s argument holds true only if they do, in fact, become substitutes – if nascent activists content themselves with sending a text when they would otherwise be demonstrating. That is a real danger, and it may even be true. But it’s also a point Gladwell didn’t attempt to prove – or, truth be told, even care to make.

The question at issue was whether or not Twitter is a “revolution in communication.” And, as was to be expected from an Oxfordian debate, the resulting conversation consisted mainly in a shifting of the goalposts, with the sides continually redefining “revolution” to suit their purposes.

My position, as it was then, is still this: not yet.

For the record, the definition of revolution I adopted is the one promulgated by Clay Shirky last year when he said:

…the new things that are happening are breaking parts of society that had actually been incredibly stable over a period of in some cases hundreds of years. And that is really the mark of a revolution. It’s not just that some additional capabilities come into a society. It’s really that the capabilities of the new tool cannot be contained by society’s current institutions.

And, again for the record, I think Clay would disagree with me that Twitter is not a revolution, at least based on his extraordinary TED Talk on the subject. And he may be right. Our debate was held before Iran, and Iran changed a lot about how people thought and talked about Twitter in the popular consciousness.

The reason I thought – and still think – the answer is “not yet” is not because I don’t think Twitter is changing the content of our discourse, or the players, or its effects on society. The difference, I think, is that the emergent architecture of communication – in less airy terms, who talks to whom – aren’t revolutionary structurally.

I admit that Twitter is not my area of expertise, and I’ll happily defer to the experts on the subject. But all the data I’ve seen suggest this: a lot of people tweet a lot, and they are listened to by a lot of people, and there is a lot of parroting (retweeting) of those at the top, but not a lot of lateral discussion. The communicative hierarchies that empower certain individuals (and viewpoints) and disempower others in, say, television are still there in Twitter, it’s just sometimes different people doing the talking. This might mean the content or viewpoint of the discussion changes, but the structural nature of the communication doesn’t.

Maybe I’m setting the ‘revolutionary’ bar too high. But my sense is that Twitter is more of the same in the Internet context. More information cascades, more homophilous groups, more divergent viewpoints, less deliberative discourse. Twitter might be changing the world, but I’m not sure it changes how we communicate – at least, not for the better.