Twitter’s new transparency policy that shows how many people view each tweet has exposed the CBC as having laughably low view counts given its high follower count.
On December 15, Twitter implemented a transparency policy change that allowed all users to know how many views every tweet receives. Previously, only a tweet’s author could access this information.
CBC’s main twitter account has 3.4 million followers – yet it averages less than 100,000 views on each of its tweets. Assuming a tweet receives 75 thousand views, that’s about 2% of CBC’s followers who actually see what the state-broadcaster tweets.
For example, a tweet on December 15 shows 53 thousand views as of December 28. Another one from the same date has 36 thousand views.
Comparatively, many prominent Twitter users and independent journalists have significantly fewer followers than CBC, yet receive way more views on Twitter. For example, podcaster Tim Pool, with 1.4 million followers (less than half of CBC) is getting about 300-800 thousand views per tweet. This equates to roughly 30% of his follower count.
In fact, The Counter Signal, founded in 2021, has a Twitter account with just over 15 thousand followers – and sometimes pulls in the same view counts as the CBC’s.
Twitter users have been suspicious about mainstream media outlets’ popularity for years on Twitter.
The New York Times has 54 million followers, but regularly gets less than 100 ‘likes’ on its articles. The New York Times receives about 175k views for most articles – 0.3% of its followers.
As an aside, Pfizer’s main account has about 500 thousand followers, yet its tweets so far have received about 15-22 thousand views per – just 4% of its followers.
Earlier this month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said all media that receives government funding should be slapped with an affiliated warning label so readers can better calibrate the truth.
“You know how foreign media is labeled on Twitter often as Russian state controlled media,” one user asked Musk.
“Why don’t we do the same thing in the US — with all of these media organizations that are telling us to go to war, you know, why don’t we label them as well? Like ‘US government state media.’”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Musk responded.
