WALLED GARDEN + PROMOTION OF DISINFORMATION:
"Big news publishers are in a strange place when it comes to X right now. Most are still posting to it (with notable exceptions like NPR and The Guardian), and they still have millions of followers. But with news business models increasingly revolving around subscriptions, publishers are focusing most of their social media efforts on sending people to their own sites. They may not see much incentive to âevolve their posting styleâ as Bier suggests.
I wondered, though: Is The New York Times unusual among big publishers in the âlink plus sentenceâ tweet format? Are any major publishers moving beyond that format and seeing more engagement on X as they link less?
I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishersâ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine donât: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC1, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at â Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News â are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: âBREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.â Theyâre sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.
These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are."
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-publishers-on-twitter-our-analysis-suggests-yes/
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Media #News #Journalism #OpenWeb #WalledGarden #Disinformation