Dear Senator @ChuckSchumer …

Dear Senator Schumer,

I applaud you and your office staff for embracing Twitter as a means of communicating with your constituents. It is a great platform for getting information out there.

However, there is a problem that I came across after I discovered that you were following me on Twitter. I was flattered that you would do such a thing.

Then I saw the little quip on your profile that reads “Office Automatically follows all followers. Follows, Replies ≠ endorsement” and it dawned on me that there was a problem in how you and/or your office was using Twitter.

The fact that follows and replies do not equal endorsement is fine. That is how it should be. But it is the policy of automatically following all followers that concerns me.

There are, according to the 2010 US Census stats, 19,378,102 people living in the great state of New York. And if all of those people were to get a Twitter account and follow you, then your office would automatically follow all of them. If all of those people tweeted just once per day at the full 140 characters allowed by Twitter, your office staff now has to read more than 2.7 billion letters! At an average of 6 letters per word, we are looking at over 452 million words per day flooding your Twitter account! I don’t think the US Tax Code contains that many words!

And do you really need all those tweets of Jane Doe complaining about having a stomach ailment that makes her use the bathroom 40 times a day, or that John Doe has decided to break up with his latest girlfriend after just 3 days? Do you really want to read 19+ million tweets that show just how dumb and disconnected some people really are?

Yes, this is a drastic scenario I have put forward, and the likelihood of it happening like this is extremely low, but I think you and your office staff see my point.

Please don’t waste our tax money by having to have dedicated Twitter readers on your staff. Only follow those people who truly matter, such as other senators, your advisors, and those “civilians” that you know personally, not the population as a whole.

As for me, you can unfollow me. I won’t be hurt or upset. I am just an adult student attending university in western New York. I may be a constituent, but I am not important enough for you and your staff to follow me or my website on Twitter. And I am positive that more than half the people you follow on Twitter are just as unimportant as I am.

Sincerely,

Daniel McCue, a concerned citizen of New York