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Twitter Odds – Beef, Drama, and Noise

Don Aguero

by Don Aguero in Entertainment

Updated Jan 17, 2018 · 9:39 AM PST

Shopping, banking, and now beef. What do these things all have in common?

They’re all done online.

There was a time when feuds were settled person-to-person. If you wanted to mock a teen mom, you had to print out a bunch of pamphlets, put on your corset, and post them around town.

Well, not anymore. Now someone like Nicki Minaj can tap a screen and call Farrah Abraham (no longer a teen but still a mom) a derogatory term so vulgar that we are not going to even discuss it.

It’s pretty nasty stuff and the rap diva has built up a reputation for drama recently, most notably throwing shade on Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards. Minaj is not showing any signs of mellowing out, so it’s safe to say that we’ll be hearing a lot from her in 2016.

The Kardashians, true to form, have also been engaging in twitter-to-twitter combat, taking shots at model Amber Rose, who initially fired her own shots at them. Like all things Kardashian, this is going to be a long, drawn-out fiasco than may span well into 2016.

Not every celebrity beef needs to go on ad nauseum, though. Take Seth Rogen and Justin Bieber. Seth made some offhand remarks about his fellow Canadian, and then retracted it once he realised it was causing a bit of a stir. A simple solution to a simple problem.  

Know who doesn’t care for such simplicity? Donald Trump, who not only has beef with other politicians, but also entire religions and ethnicities. By antagonizing Mexicans (there are over 125 million) and Muslims (over 1.6 Billion), Trump has definitely bitten off more than he can chew. And he’s definitely hearing about it on Twitter.

Getting lambasted on Twitter isn’t the end of the world for celebrities and politicians, though. Indeed, it’s precisely what some of them want; remember the old adage: no press is bad press. By feuding with fellow stars, these celebs are ensuring they stay in the national conscience and that’s basically like printing money.

Who’s going to rule the roost in terms of Twitter popularity in 2016? We set the odds, below, based on Twitter’s finest metric: the retweet!

Odds on who will receive the most retweets in 2016:

Donald Trump: 1/10

Kim Kardashian: 14/1

Taylor Swift: 14/1

Justin Bieber: 17/1

Kanye West: 20/1

Amber Rose: 43/2

Farrah Abraham: 29/1

Seth Rogen: 500/1

[Photo credit: Eva Rinaldi [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Photo has been cropped.]

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