In the hours after Tucker Carlson’s new show, “Tucker on Twitter,” debuted on the social media site Tuesday afternoon, the host of the first episode has tweeted a statistic that, superficially anyway, indicates that It was actually seen by a surprising number of people.
“views” count according to Twitter on tweetAs of the time of this writing, the first episode of “Tucker on Twitter” has been viewed at least 29 million times. Which is actually a huge number compared to the roughly 3 million people, on average, who watched the night when Carlson was still employed by Fox. But not fast enough: Twitter’s measurement Real Engagement – Retweeting and quoting tweets, likes, replies and bookmarks tells a very different and far less impactful story.
As of this writing, the tweet hosting the first episode of “Tucker on Twitter” has been retweeted nearly 112,000 times, quote-tweeted nearly 13,000 times, liked nearly 373,000 times, and bookmarked nearly 22,000 times. It has also received around 35,000 responses. The scene was like this on Tuesday night around 9 pm:
They are not really small numbers and they are likely to increase overnight. Clearly Carlsen has a lot of fans on Twitter. But there’s a huge gulf between the number of engagements and ‘views’, and that discrepancy has a simple explanation: Twitter’s ‘views’ don’t really tell us anything about how popular or sought-after a given tweet is.
This is not our claim. According to Twitter’s own FAQ regarding view count, which you can read here, “Anyone logged in to Twitter who views a Tweet is counted as a view, regardless of where they view the Tweet (e.g. home, search, profile, etc.) or whether they follow the author to be or not If you’re the author, even viewing your own tweet counts as a view.”
In other words, a view is counted even if you didn’t search for the Tweet, but it crossed your screen when you were scrolling. And it’s very likely to happen on the new algorithmic “For You” tab that Twitter added last January, in particular, as has since been widely reported, if a tweet displays content Twitter owner Elon Musk has a vested interest,
But there is more. According to Twitter, “If you view a Tweet more than once, multiple views can be counted, but not all views are unique. For example, you might see a tweet on the web and then on your phone.” tweet, and it will be seen twice.
Which is to say, again, that it’s impossible to draw any conclusions about the popularity of “Tucker on Twitter” from “views” counts. On the other hand, if there is any measure of tracking actual engagement, the show is actually doing much, much worse than Fox News, where as of April 24 Carlson hosted what the New York Times called “the world’s most racist.” Show” declared. History of Cable News.
As has been the case with all press inquiries since Musk took to Twitter, a request for comment from TheWrap received an auto-response of a poop emoji.
