An NBC article claims ‘apolitical users’ fled the platform, but an industry expert tells NR ‘the evidence points to some inorganic activity.’
An NBC News report on the reaction to Elon Musk’s move to purchase Twitter appears to have massively overestimated fluctuations in certain follower counts on the social-media site, while presenting a tenuous theory to explain actual changes in the relative followings of prominent liberal and conservative users.
According to the report, which was published on Tuesday evening, former president Barack Obama had lost 300,000 followers since Monday, while singer Katy Perry lost more than 200,000. In a Twitter thread promoting the piece, author Ben Collins, who covers disinformation, extremism, and the Internet for NBC, also claimed that Taylor Swift saw a drop-off of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 followers.
Collins used these numbers to assert that the result of Musk’s pending acquisition had been that “apolitical users fled” and “right-wing users joined” the platform, but data compiled by Social Blade suggests Collins dramatically overestimated the number of supposedly “apolitical users” who fled the platform.
Perry gained a little over 300 followers on Monday before seeing a dip of close to 5,000 on Tuesday — a change perfectly in line with normal variation. Perry saw a drop of close to 10,500 over the course of one week in January and of numbers approaching 30,000 during two separate weeks last October and November. At one point last summer, Perry’s account went through a several-weeks-long stretch in which she lost hundreds of thousands of followers, the kind of drop described — but not actually observed — by Collins this week.
Similarly, Social Blade’s data shows that Swift lost 162 followers on Monday and a little over 10,000 on Tuesday. Again, this is in line with previous trends, Swift’s account has been bleeding followers over the past couple of weeks, even losing close to 9,500 on Easter Sunday.
Obama gained 98 on Monday, saw a drop-off of just over 5,000 on Tuesday, and rebounded to gain 18,000 on Wednesday.
On Twitter, some observers speculated that Collins had made the mistake of merely glancing at Twitter’s estimate of profiles’ follower counts instead of confirming the exact counts. The reporter did not respond to a request for comment on his process for determining follower-count fluctuations, or the reporting that led to his assertion that Musk had driven “apolitical users” away.
Collins also noted that Twitter was claiming that the fluctuations in follower counts was entirely organic, and Twitter issued a statement explaining that “while we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation.” While the massive drops in follower counts for some progressives and members of the entertainment industry have been exaggerated, the increases seen by conservative politicians, publications, and pundits have been more noteworthy.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, for example, has seen his follower count increase by over 350,000 over the past several days.
Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of Minds, an alternative social-media platform that places an emphasis on free expression and transparency, said he doubts that the increase in conservative Twitter account followings is entirely the result of right-wing users flocking to the platform, suggesting instead that internal changes to Twitter’s algorithms might have something to do with it.
“I think that the evidence points to some inorganic activity,” Ottman told National Review. While the tech executive stressed that he could not say for sure that Twitter has changed its algorithms since Monday, he noted that “the surges did not happen the moment the announcement came out. It was a little bit delayed, which doesn’t really make sense.”
Only about 5,500 of DeSantis’s new followers arrived on Monday, the day that Musk reached an agreement to acquire Twitter.
Ottman also said that the code freeze announced by Twitter may have stopped employees at the social-media company from tampering with the site in a way that would depress conservative follower counts.
The only way to know for sure what the cause of the fluctuations has been, according to Ottman, would be an audit “not only of the current algorithms, but of the version history of the code.”
“I think that everyone deserves to know when changes are happening, how that’s influencing their reach,” added Ottman.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.