My first thought when I read this headline:

40 percent of Twitter messages ‘pointless babble’: study ^[1]

was that it must have been a flawed study, as 40% seems extremely low. Turns out I was right, as the rest of the article indicates the following:

Conversational messages — defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between users or try to engage followers in conversation — accounted for 751 messages or 37.55 percent.

In other words, pointless babble that goes back and forth between users.

Pear said tweets with “pass-along value” — messages that are being “re-tweeted” or passed on by users to their followers — accounted for 174 messages or 8.70 percent.

AKA: pointless babble that is passed along to other users.

Self-promotion by companies was next with 117 tweets or 5.85 percent

Corporate pointless babble.

followed by spam with 75 tweets or 3.75 percent.

Nigerian and “enhancement” pointless babble.

It said tweets with news from mainstream media publications accounted for 72 tweets or 3.60 percent.

Considering that most of what the mainstream media has produced over the past 40 years has been pointless babble, I’d say this category falls under that heading as well.

So my rewritten headline:

100 percent of Twitter messages ‘pointless babble’