Elon Claims Twitter’s Traffic Is At An All-Time High Because He Can’t Be Bothered To Understand The Misleading Data People Show Him
from the confirmation-bias-is-stronger-than-ketamine dept
Elon Musk is like the most gullible confirmation bias sucker who has ever existed. If you present him with literally anything that confirms his priors, no matter how obviously bullshit, he’ll run with it as truth. His Twitter feed is just non-stop stupid people feeding him nonsense, and when he sees something he agrees with, he immediately promotes it, no questions asked.
For example, last week he tweeted that traffic on ExTwitter had reached an “all-time high,” even though any human being with more than two brain cells to rub together would look at this graph and say “that… is clearly not right.”
The chart, which is oddly labeled “X Organic Traffic (12 years),” shows some ups and downs of traffic until early 2023 (about 5 or 6 months after Elon took over). Then the traffic suddenly jumps in basically the course of a day from somewhere around 1 billion (units are not given) to 2.5 billion, and then that number crawls upwards to about 3.3 billion today.
Even the most gullible sucker in the world (except, apparently, Elon) would maybe pause to wonder why there was that massive more than 2x jump at that one point. Possibly Elon thought it was all because traffic jumped in a single day once he took over or whatever.
But we already know that’s not even remotely true. Part of that is due to numbers Elon himself released, where he confirmed (without realizing it) that users on ExTwitter had declined precipitously. Since then, others have confirmed that ExTwitter’s traffic continues to be in the shitter. SensorTower, which tracks app downloads, noted that basically all social media apps have been on the decline lately, but ExTwitter’s decline in downloads stands out below all the rest.
So, what the fuck is actually going on in that chart that Musk posted? It had to be based on something. Thankfully, SocialMediaToday’s Andrew Hutchinson worked out the details, which show that (once again) you should never believe anything that Elon Musk actually says when talking about some information people gave him. Because he doesn’t understand it.
The data is from SEMrush, one of the more well-known tools that measure search engine referral traffic. And that’s what it’s looking at. It is looking at how much search engine referral traffic there is to Twitter, not “traffic.” Just how much traffic is coming from Google to Twitter.
So, then what is the giant bump? It turns out that it happened in April of 2023, just as Twitter turned off its free API access for most users. This had people speculating that it had something to do with that.
But the answer was actually even more mundane. That was also when SEMRush changed how it measured search engine referral traffic, causing such numbers to spike for everyone.
“Upon reviewing the report, there appears to be a misunderstanding about the organic traffic values. The spike observed in the data corresponds with an update we implemented. This update, executed on April 6th, resulted in additional data being incorporated into our metrics (that is the SERP Features). Consequently, this led to spikes in figures in our toolkit across all websites, not exclusively Twitter.”
In other words, comparing those numbers after April 2023 with those before April 2023 is like comparing apples to oranges.
So, no, Twitter has not reached record highs. No, that chart is not showing major growth. All indications (including Twitter’s own self-reported numbers) suggest that the platform is, at best, stagnant, and more likely losing users rapidly.
But, Elon is so gullible and so desperate to believe his own bullshit that he saw someone post such a chart and immediately assumed it must be true, even as anyone who thought about it would pause to try to figure out why there was such a big leap.
Filed Under: confirmation bias, elon musk, referral traffic, traffic
Companies: semrush, twitter, x
Comments on “Elon Claims Twitter’s Traffic Is At An All-Time High Because He Can’t Be Bothered To Understand The Misleading Data People Show Him”
Real weird Y-axis label numbers
Very strange that the first Y-axis tick has a label of 843.2M and then the subsequent are 1.7B, 2.5B and and 3.3B. 843.2M *2 = 1686.4M, so rounds to 1.7B, 843.2M * 3 = 2529.6M, so rounds to 2.5B, but 843.2M * 4 = 3372.8M and should be 3.4B not 3.3B.
Looks manipulated in some fashion.
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That’s common in statistics when we’re trying to show trends across orders of magnitude. Please learn statistics before commenting on statistics. Everybody always thinks they found a fatal flaw in everything.
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This isn’t statistics, this is data reporting. I work with lot of data analysis and precision and accuracy matters for correct interpretation by the audience.
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You work in data analysis and you’ve never produced a chart whose axes weren’t perfectly incremental or logarithmic?
Re: Re: Re:2
i swear your just trolling or just insulting people for no reason
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Re: Re: Re:3
I thought I was a violent defeatist.
Make up your mind, andrea. As entertaining as I find your multiple personalities to be, I’m sure not everyone feels the same.
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Re: Re: Re:4
why are you obsessed with andrea?
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Re: Re: Re:5
The real question is “why is andrea pretending to be someone else?”
But only you can answer that.
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Re: Re: Re:6
I love you too.
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Uh, I think I found the problem, chief.
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Dyslexia: a waste is a terrible thing to mind.
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You’re right, my mistake in transposing.
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It happens.
If I had a nickel for every hour I spent chasing a bug that turned out to be a missing parenthesis or semicolon…
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Its 834.2M, not 843.2M.
834.2M * 3 = 3.3368B, which rounds to 3.3B
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Lmao. I skimmed and assumed he found a gap or acceleration in an axis, which some people can confuse some people.
This is a different level though.
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Provided you are what you claim, I’m over the moon you’re combing Elon’s claims for bullshit. Transposition error in a given could have happened to any of us. Keep up the good work.
'Ignore the context, just look at the spike in numbers since I took over!'
Elon’s stupidity does open up some interesting possibilities however, if say a report came out all about the drastic spike in racist and bigoted comments on the site, it included a line graph like that one and the shared image had the ‘toxic comments’ explanation for what it was ‘accidentally’ trimmed out so you had to open the full image to see that part…
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It’s like $camology…oops, Scientology…where nothing ever goes down, it’s growth, growth, growth all the time.
Capitalist problem
Stagnation/Saturation/over abundance/it lasts to long.
This is the number of People in the world and this is how much you can get from them. DUH!
Solution?
MAKE THINGS BREAK. MAKE NEW THINGS(the consumer thinks) are worth MORE.
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Don’t forget the model. Give them a partial device that’s missing 50 parts, then sell them a new device each year that’s missing one less part. Microsloth!
How does this man still have money?
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Actually, once you have enough of the stuff, it becomes kinda hard to lose it all. It is far, far easier to make money when you already have a lot. Hell, just consider interest alone. 1 billion bux inna 6% bank brings home what… do the math. 🙂
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$60,000,000 dollars?
Ummmm….. has it never occurred to anyone that Elmo said this because he thought others would not critically analyze it and by doing so he might bring back some of the advertisers because it sounded like the site was getting lots of exposure…
just saying.
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Any advertiser stupid enough to believe anything he says these days without heavily fact-checking every word is likely to be stupid/gullible enough that they never left the site, so probably not though I wouldn’t put it past him to think that a scam like that might work.
░O░r░g░a░n░i░c░ ░T░r░a░f░f░i░c░ ░i░n░ ░B░i░o░
With the sudden non-controllable flagging of pics being adult on accounts by someone who doesn’t speak english starting to think its all about getting advertisers to come back.
Ignoring my account setting to show me the adult pics without the blur.
Putting the blur on every image posted by furries, porn stars, kinksters, sex workers… if you can see naughty bits or not.
If only they still had dev servers to test these bad ideas out on first rather than just dropping it live on prod for users to encounter and wonder why the fuck Elmo broke it this time.
I’d just like to know what one standard unit of Organic Traffic weighs.
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The average human produces 14-16 ounces daily.
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Techdirt seems more political now
This angry article shows one-sided thinking of the writer with one end in mind from first thought.
Many possibilities — including those users were already there but not counted — still cause for celebration.
Does the writer go after any of the other social network braggarts out there and pop their bubble? If he went around the room and tagged each one with their faults it might show some evenhandedness.
Sounds like the writer wants twitter to fail.
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The s!te owner hates X since Elon Musk fired Twitter’s then-chief censor, the deviant homosexual Yoel Roth.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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wpath files
Let us know when you master keeping your jaw closed and we will start working on holding your breath
Re: Re: Re:2
Let us know when you plan on providing an actual citation instead of a bundle of files.
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bundle of lies*
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You… do realize Yoel quit and Elon begged him to stay, right?
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You know the site itself runs a weekly article linking to snapshots of the site’s history so it’s pretty easy to check how much the content and tone have changed, right? Not by much, as it happens.
Techdirt have always been negative in their coverage of tech shitbags, Elon has always been a shitbag, the only things that have changed is he fired his PR people tasked with hiding his shitbaggery and for people on the right, now he’s your shitbag so you’ll defend him until he stops being useful.
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If they’re bragging how great their company is even while they’re driving it into the ground? Well, no, but that might be because Elmo’s the only one doing that.
Why doesn’t he just have a ketamine accident already?
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Because Elmo doesn’t take ketamine. He doesn’t need intoxicating substances to help him run his businesses into the ground.
Sociopathy and Delusion
I wonder what’s more prevalent in billionaires, sociopathy or delusion? What’s the prevalence of both? Hmmm… who can we put in that category?
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To the first question, yes.
To the second question, well…
That’s a lot of politicians, rich people, Wall Street fucks and their enablers…
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Sociopathy more than delusion I would imagine given that one almost seems to be required to make that much money whereas being delusional is more optional.
TBF, depending on how you interpret the data, you can demonstrate things like cancer causing cellphones.
without federal subsidies
he would be just another loudmouth libertarian shouting at homeless people for being takers.