Nieman Journalism Lab: Twitter/X Punishes Accounts That Post Links

Twitter/X accounts that post links to external news articles receive significantly less engagement than those that do not, according to a data analysis of 18 major publishers' accounts. The analysis found that traditional news outlets with paywalls and link-heavy posting habits clustered at the bottom of engagement metrics, while accounts that aggregate breaking news without links saw higher likes, comments, and retweets. The findings suggest the platform under Elon Musk penalizes link-sharing, discouraging its use as a news aggregator in favor of keeping users within its own ecosystem.

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April: I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ 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 don’t: Al Jazeera English , AP , BBC , Breitbart News , CBS News , Daily Wire , Fox News , NBC News , and Reuters . The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report , unusual whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet : “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re 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. Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.