Nieman Lab·2026-04-08

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

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 X/Twitter. Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly

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 X/Twitter. Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly

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