- Twitter’s “View Count” function does not suit all users … including Elon Musk
- A specific meeting aimed at the reach of his tweets has been organized
- An engineer’s response was followed by his immediate dismissal
Last December, Twitter rolled out yet another new feature, with “View Count“, which allows everyone to view the number of views of a publication, directly under the latter. For some, this allows them to publicly demonstrate their popularity, while for others it can generate frustration, especially when the reach of the tweets is lower than the number of followers. Enough to infuriate more than one Twitter user, starting with… Elon Musk.
Elon Musk worried about his “View Count”
With View Count, each user can thus observe the number of impressions of a tweet. According to Elon Musk, this feature aims to demonstrate how Twitter is more alive than it seems, “because over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like“. According to the American magazine Platformer, this Tuesday, February 7, a meeting was held at Twitter during which Elon Musk asked for an explanation as to the low reach of his publications.
With more than 128 million subscribers, the American giant would have said it was surprised to see some of its tweets displaying only a few tens of thousands of views. In response, one of the engineers present tried to demonstrate, using various Google Trends data in particular, that people seemed simply tired of hearing about Elon Musk. The boss of Twitter would then have dismissed his engineer on the spot.
Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
Elon Musk’s reach limited by Twitter?
The American billionaire would also have asked his employees to devote some of their time to analyzing how his various tweets are recommended to Twitter users. One of Elon Musk’s latest tweets with the most impressions (more than 64 million) is a message that contains a single character. From there to think that Elon Musk is censored on his own network…
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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2023
At the same time, the journalist from washington post, Taylor Lorenz, for his part wanted to demonstrate the inefficiency of the View Count system. Via a private account, therefore completely inaccessible to the public, and not counting the slightest subscriber, Taylor Lorenz still managed to record dozens of views on his tweets in a few minutes.
In case you need proof that view counts on Twitter aren’t accurate:
I have a locked, private account with ZERO followers for reporting purposes. I just posted these two tweets. Check the view counts. One tweet I posted on my private acct less than 1 min ago already has 59 views pic.twitter.com/cNVrRWCZ4u
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) February 9, 2023
This raises some questions about the relevance of the View Count system on the one hand, but also the effectiveness of private accounts…
