Nieman Journalism Lab: Twitter/X Punishes Accounts That Post Links

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. ★