Tweeter Is Not Real Life

Tweeter Is Not Real Life is the third option of the Persona Mode selector on the setup screen. With this option chosen, the country's focus group is no longer made up of the era's voters. Instead it is twenty-four online commentators, the same pundits, streamers and podcasters who populate the Tweeter feed, and it is these commentators who judge every policy instead. The setup screen's help text explains that the twenty-four commentators replace voters, and that support for each of them is spread across the states at random rather than following real demographics.

The cast

The commentators fall into three groups of eight: the online right, mostly strongly Republican; the online left, mostly strongly Democratic; and a heterodox centre of swing voices split between the two sides. Because every commentator already writes and speaks in an exaggerated style, switching Whacko Mode on or off makes no visible difference to them, and the setup screen only allows one of the two options to be chosen at a time.

What changes

This option overrides the usual choice of era: whichever decade the game is set in, the same cast of commentators judges every policy, and the game's other historical detail continues to reflect the chosen era as normal. Support for each commentator is spread across the fifty states at random rather than following real political geography, and no state leans towards either party, so state-level results in this mode do not resemble real electoral maps. Congressional elections are also resolved at the state level rather than by individual district.

This mode has a few known rough edges. In a modern-era debate, the audience member who asks a question is drawn from the same online cast, but the debate's overall scoring still uses the era's ordinary voters rather than the commentators, so the debate is not judged consistently with the rest of the month. Chatting with a persona after a policy turn also uses the era's ordinary voters rather than the online cast. The Fourth Estate media system does not run at all in this mode, since its own pundits would otherwise be reacting to versions of themselves.

Access

Choosing either Persona Mode option other than Off asks a free account to upgrade, and a non-premium account always plays with Persona Mode off regardless of what was requested. Workshop packs cannot set Persona Mode.

Persona Mode, including this option, is not offered in Career Mode. A career always plays with the era's real voters.