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Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes.

Audience & Social – Nieman Lab · Laura Hazard Owen · last updated

Elon Musk has said as much: Links in tweets are bad for engagement. Over the last few days, sparked by a post from Nate Silver, people have started arguing again about the relationships between links and engagement. But our new analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers makes it pretty clear: Links do seem to hurt news publishers on Twitter.

Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly published a report: “Does Twitter matter for news sites?“

The report found that Twitter drove little traffic to most news sites, generating only around 1.5% of most publishers’ traffic. But, the authors wrote, “Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news…Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”

Ten years later, the site formerly known as Twitter still drives very little traffic to news sites. But it’s also bad for conversational and breaking news.

Earlier this week, Nate Silver published “Social media has become a freak show.” Silver wrote that X has become “next to useless” for following breaking news like the war in Iran because its algorithm penalizes posts that include links.

“The New York Times has 53 million followers, and yet its tweets often produce only a few hundred likes, retweets, and replies even when they reveal urgent, breaking news,” Silver wrote.

X head of product Nikita Bier pushed back, blaming the Times’ low engagement on its paywall — but also on the quality of its tweets:

Big news publishers are in a strange place when it comes to X right now. Most are still posting to it (with notable exceptions like NPR and The Guardian), and they still have millions of followers. But with news business models increasingly revolving around subscriptions, publishers are focusing most of their social media efforts on sending people to their own sites. They may not see much incentive to “evolve their posting style” as Bier suggests.

I wondered, though: Is The New York Times unusual among big publishers in the “link plus sentence” tweet format? Are any major publishers moving beyond that format and seeing more engagement on X as they link less?

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC1, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

If you want an easier-to-read version of the chart, here it is with some of the publishers stripped out.

Nonetheless, most of the publishers in my sample link out a lot. (I couldn’t find any biggies who are following Elon Musk’s advice to write a description of a story in the first tweet, then follow it with a link in a second tweet.) The New York Times, with 53 million followers, included links in 88% of its tweets; CNN, with 61.7 million followers, had links in 90% of tweets; The Wall Street Journal, with 21 million followers, had links in 98% of its tweets. Some examples:

(A note on the Bitcoin story: X’s Bier pointed to this tweet as a better example of how to share the Bitcoin story on Twitter. They don’t feel meaningfully different to me, though — both are just a couple of sentences and a link. Carreyrou’s tweet, published Wednesday at 12:40 a.m., has been liked, commented on, or RT’d 9,242 times, and the Times’ tweet, published a few hours later, has been liked, commented on, or RT’d 8,361 times.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the engagement-maxxing account Globe Eye News (with just 886,000 followers) never linked out in the tweets in my sample and saw massive engagement: A median 8,418 engagements per tweet. The New York Times, with a following more than 53 times larger, had a median 383 engagements per tweet.

Fox News (28.7 million followers) is an outlier among the traditional publishers, including links in just 9% of its tweets. Most of its tweets contain videos or graphics instead. That strategy works: Fox News had the third highest median engagement in my sample after Globe Eye News and Leading Report.

I obviously don’t mean to imply that a link is the only factor keeping a big news publisher from high engagement on a tweet. There are lots of factors. But this analysis shows that the way that most big news publishers, with the exception of Fox News, really haven’t changed the way they tweet, even as the platform’s incentives have changed.

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  1. Well, to clarify: The BBC recently added a paywall for U.S. users, but I looked at the BBC’s U.K. Twitter account, @bbcnews.
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