The Donald Trump brain trust decided not to send the twice-impeached (and four-times indicted) president to the Fox News-hosted Republican presidential debate in Wisconsin on Wednesday. Instead, they formulated a counterprogramming plan featuring a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson. The interview, filmed beside what looked like a sitcom fireplace, ran on Elon Musk’s Xwitter, home of Carlson’s new show.
Following the debate, Carlson and Trump were crowing about the interview’s high viewership numbers. Trump went to his Truth Social account to brag, “Looks like the Tucker Carlson interview will end up with an ‘over 100 Million’ number. Wow!” Wow indeed!
As for Carlson, he gloated that his interview’s audience size was “far larger” than what Trump could reach on cable news. And Musk? In response to a tweet saying the interview could become the “most watched” on Xwitter, he wrote, simply, “For sure.”
As of the writing of this story, the “views” statistic on the video is at 230.6 million. (That’s more than the number of people who vote in our country!) But the “views” metric doesn’t mean what Carlson, Trump, and Musk want you to think it means.
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If you go to X’s Help Center, they describe what 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.” But what exactly are the analytics connected to video “views?” According to Xwitter:
“The main Twitter video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view. This applies to View metrics for both uploaded videos and live broadcasts.”
This is a very literal idea of a “view”—distinct from, say, a “watch”—and not much of a bar to clear. On top of that, a major booster of the interview’s view count is Musk himself, whose over 154 million “follower” list has been exposed as a lot of smoke and mirrors. So “views” mean next to nothing when it comes to actual engagement. You need only look at the “Reposts,” “Quotes,” and “Likes” to see that the number of people engaging with this video is rather pathetic.
Let’s pretend for one moment that Trump, Carlson, and Musk were right, and more than two-thirds of the U.S. population watched Trump’s interview. It would mean that of the hundreds of millions of people who watched the video, less than 0.3 percent of them bothered to “like” it.
But very few people actually watched the video in the grand scheme of things, and that seems very obvious from all the data collected so far.
Here’s an update on Fox News’ ratings.
Yikes.
Sign the petition: Disqualify Trump from running for public office.
We talk about the upcoming Republican presidential debate and how sad a situation it is. The Republican Party shot itself in the foot with a Trump-sized bullet and now it’s stuck with him for the foreseeable future. We still try to game out the possible paths the Republican field might take in order to rid themselves of the Donald.
