Thanks to Elon Musk, Twitter underwent yet another undesirable and unneeded change this past week.
Tweet viewing statistics were normally kept private by the social media platform, allowing users to observe how their content was being used but not by the general public. Tweets now also have a public view count in addition to retweets, quote tweets, and likes, according to Twitter. The function has now become available to users on the web, iOS, and Android apps since it first began to roll out on Thursday.
Not every tweet will have a public view count, according to a Twitter FAQ. Older tweets, tweets from Twitter Circles, and community tweets won’t have the data available. “Anyone who views your Tweet counts as a view, regardless of where they see your Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, Tweets embedded in articles, etc.) or whether or not they follow you. Even an author looking at their own Tweet counts as a view,” examines the FAQ. “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.”
Musk provided a defense when users started to wonder what the purpose of a view count on tweets was. He stated, ignoring the fact that interaction has always been a significantly more significant measure on Twitter, especially when it comes to advertisers, that “Tweets are read 100 times more than they are liked.”