Despite Media Hysteria, Twitter Is Far From Dying

As #RIPTwitter trends and the media are awash with coverage lamenting the site’s apparently imminent demise, a look at the actual data on Twitter’s usage suggests that the platform is far from dead. While Twitter is losing both employees and advertisers, and a few high-profile celebrities have departed, the platform’s core user base appears to be as engaged as ever — a point Elon Musk himself made recently. What do the numbers tell us?

While Twitter no longer regularly releases official statistics on daily tweet volume, its vital statistics can be estimated from its public data feeds. The timeline below shows the estimated total daily tweets (blue) and tweeting users (orange) from Jan. 1, 2012, through Nov. 8, 2022. Peaking in July 2013, Twitter’s popularity slowly declined over the years, until pandemic lockdowns led to skyrocketing growth — a surge that was wiped away just six months later, when Twitter’s 2020 election anti-misinformation efforts went astray. As Musk’s Twitter takeover became more likely over the last few months, daily tweet volume actually increased and has remained stable in the weeks since his acquisition.

In the words of Mark Twain, news of Twitter’s demise has been greatly exaggerated.

It would be possible for Twitter to experience extreme churn: its user base could be leaving en masse while being replaced at the same rate by an influx of conservatives emboldened by its perceived new moderation policies. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. The average “account age” (days since the account was created) of tweeting accounts (blue) continues to increase linearly, while the median account age (orange) remains stable. If existing users were making a massive exodus and being replaced by new users, these numbers would be plunging. Instead, they paint a picture of a stagnating site, with a dominant base of long-term users, around since the beginning, who use the platform heavily, along with a high-churn cadre of new users since the start of the pandemic who try it out and soon leave.

It is clear that despite all the proselytizing, there has been no concerted rush for the exits by the Twitterati.

Even the impact of Twitter’s short-lived experiment of allowing paid verification seems to have been far less serious than breathless media coverage would suggest. While a small number of high-profile impersonations attracted global headlines, verified tweets as a percentage of all tweets experienced a one-day peak of only around 0.7 percent of all tweets — barely up from 0.6 percent of all tweets in the past few months and right in line with the 0.7-0.75 percent of tweets for the first half of the year. Instead of the media’s hyperbole of a platform deluged with paid impersonators, it seems the reality was barely a blip.

Verified users exert an outsize role in driving the conversation on Twitter. On a typical day over the past two years, around 8 to 9 percent of all tweets are either tweets by verified users or retweets of those tweets, meaning as

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