Twitter activity update: reporting habit gone
In the first month of the pandemic, there were 235 million tweet impressions. A year later, it was around 20 million a month. Now it has dropped to half a million.
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Twitter Update
I’m just catching up with the recording of the Christmas audios for you and then we’ll be back on track. There have been developments with Puigdemont and the Catalan separatist case and Vox has caused an interesting election-year fuss in Castilla y León over abortion.
I wrote a month ago about how it was time for me to break the Twitter habit, after so many years and seeing which way Musk was taking the platform after buying it in October. Have I managed that over Christmas and the New Year? Mostly. Both the cumulative monthly number of tweets and the daily posting habit have dropped right down (see the image above) and won’t drop much more unless I stop talking to 100,000 readers or posting links to articles altogether. The daily reporting activitiy on Twitter, as a first place to publish new news and documents and reactions, is gone.
Tweet impressions, which is the part Musk should be worried about with his advertisers, and the part that we should all worry about if we think about the spread of reporting (the global public sphere bit) have fallen all the way from more than 20 million a month 18 months ago to half a million now. This is a huge fall from what Twitter used to be with journalism, at least in my experience. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, it was over 10 million impressions a day, totalling 235 million for that month. From 235 million a month to 20 million a month to half a million now.
Like any habit, it is as not as easy to change as you might think after so many years. Now it feels like a personal challenge to get the activity even further down over the next couple of months, to try to go down to zero, but I won’t disappear completely because readers want to say hello and ask questions from time to time and I won’t close the account because there are more than 10 years of reporting and contextual notes on how Spain has changed over that decade there. The daily reporting energy, though, is now being channelled into this Substack for you.
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As long as we are versatile we can switch from network to network and adapt. That is what we have been doing for decades. By seeing the drop in numbers it gives us a concrete reason to move on, rather than sit and tolerate what we do not want to tolerate.