Stop us if you think you’ve heard this one before: Tucker Carlson posts a new episode of his show on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and within hours a gushing press release brags about truly amazing viewership. Except it turns out no, probably not really that amazing.
This time, it involves disgraced former president Donald Trump, who was interviewed for an episode of Carlson’s web series “Tucker on X” that dropped Wednesday night, just minutes before the Fox News-hosted GOP primary debate. A debate that, of course, Trump didn’t attend.
Prior to the debate, Carlson boasted that viewership of his interview with Trump would dwarf Fox News ratings, and superficially that prediction came true. As of this writing, the video has clocked more than 108 million views. Cue a Trump press release bragging that the interview “completely” overshadowed “all of television programming on Wednesday night.”
But, not so fast. Yes, 108 million is an amazing sounding number. But as we explained back in June, it’s also almost meaningless.
According to the X (formerly Twitter) FAQ, which you can read here, practically anything counts as a view.
“Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view, regardless of where they see the Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, etc.) or whether or not they follow the author. If you’re the author, looking at your own Tweet also counts as a view,” the company says
In other words, a view is counted even if you didn’t actively look at the post — posts by the way were formerly known as “tweets” before Elon Musk changed the site’s name to X — even if all it did was cross your screen while you were scrolling. Which by the way is a very likely occurrence on X’s algorithmic “For You” tab… especially if that tweet features content by users Twitter owner Elon Musk personally wants to boost.
That’s not all. “Multiple views may be counted if you view a Tweet more than once, but not all views are unique. For example, you could look at a Tweet on web and then on your phone, and that would count as two views.”
Did the Tweet — sorry, we mean post — come across your feed more than once, either algorithmically, or because someone or ones retweeted it? Did you see it on mobile and desktop? Every single time you see it might, and probably does, count as individual views.
The upshot: Twitter “views” tell us next to nothing whatsoever about the popularity or virality of a given post, because views have no relationship whatsoever to how much actual engagement the post got.
And shocker: The numbers that record real engagement tell a much different story.
As of this writing, Carlson’s interview with Trump has been reposted (formerly “retweeted”) 139,700 times, quote-posted (formerly “quote-tweeted”) 11,100 times, liked 457,00 times, bookmarked 31,800 times, and has been replied to around 40,000 times. Not especially low numbers, and they’re likely to go up overnight. It’s undeniable that Trump has a lot of supporters, many of whom swarm on Twitter.
But these days, Fox averages about 1.7 million viewers during its primetime broadcast. And notice, the specificity of the word “viewers.” Because none of the numbers tracking engagement on a X post tell you if someone actually watched the video.
We have no idea how many people sat through the whole 45 minute interview between the former president who has been indicted 4 times, and the man who used to host what the New York Times declared to be “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” It’s impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever. But if we assume engagement is a likelier means of getting an accurate count than passive “views,” the interview almost certainly did not end up “overshadowing all of Television programming on Wednesday night,” even if ratings were halved by Trump’s absence, as Brian Stelter predicted.
Representatives for X (formerly Twitter) didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from TheWrap.
