Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April:
I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18
large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes +
comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have
paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The
Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English,
AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News,
Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and
Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading
Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets
without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading
Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with
the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as
engagement-maxing accounts.These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt
engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a
graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The
traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom
left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly
indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their
followings are.
Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.
