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

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.