At 870K followers, Jonathan Moyo is Zimbabwe’s third most followed politician on Twitter after Nelson Chamisa (1M) and ED Mnangagwa (920K).
But he most certainly is no longer enjoying the huge traffic on his page after the CCC supporters employed a very lethal, new political warfare on him: the dots.
You see, Twitter is a cool, efficient tool for communication, even if such communication means telling people to go hang. But the success of the communication on Twitter is not exactly measured in terms of the discussion it generates.
On Twitter, provoking a significant response is actually evidence of a shitty communication: it’s a phenomenon known as The Ratio. The concept of The Ratio works like this: If the number of replies to a tweet vastly outweighs its other forms of engagement such as likes and retweets, then your followers are simply telling you that your tweet is crap.
And Jonathan Moyo is getting that message every single day, on every single tweet, ever since he questioned Chamisa’s political tactics or lack thereof.
It’s a major improvement from the CCC supporters who would often resort to name-calling and writing unprintedables when criticised.
Some of the dots are as long as 14 inches, meaning your scroll down your screen multiple times to get to the next comment, which shockingly is another long string of dots! To spice it up, some of the dots actually have more “likes” and retweets than Moyo’s original post!
The dots are effective because they shut out people who would genuinely want to interact with your post. The dots break genuine conversation, reducing even the best post to a pile of cat’s 🐈 poo 💩.
In most cases I’ve seen, the dots outweigh typed comments by a ratio of 10:1. Where I was lucky to find a comment and tried to read it, it would be nothing to do with the subject of the post but some mean stuff like: “Saka manje uchaita sei?”, “Just delete your account Bhangu”, or “Come back home, b*^#h!”
There’s some sort of honour in the way the CCC is dropping grenades of dots in Jonso’s tweets. That’s a very civilized way of protest than hurling unprintables of someone’s mother, or the shape of their head.
Jonso is said to never block anyone on Twitter, but maybe he might now have to take the liberty of the block 🚫 button. But still, that option will take him all day and beyond considering the huge numbers of “dotters” he will have to block.
For someone who enjoyed years of churning out one-direction propaganda on State-owned media, social media has become the great equalizer where you get as much as you give, or more.
