While Twitter no longer regularly releases official statistics on daily tweet volume, its vital statistics can be estimated from its public data feeds. The timeline below shows the estimated total daily tweets (blue) and tweeting users (orange) from Jan. 1, 2012, through Nov. 8, 2022. Peaking in July 2013, Twitter’s popularity slowly declined over the years, until pandemic lockdowns led to skyrocketing growth – a surge that was wiped away just six months later, when Twitter’s 2020 election anti-misinformation efforts went astray. As Musk’s Twitter takeover became more likely over the last few months, daily tweet volume actually increased and has remained stable in the weeks since his acquisition.
In the words of Mark Twain, news of Twitter’s demise has been greatly exaggerated.
It would be possible for Twitter to experience extreme churn: its user base could be leaving en masse while being replaced at the same rate by an influx of conservatives emboldened by its perceived new moderation policies. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. The average “account age” (days since the account was created) of tweeting accounts (blue) continues to increase linearly, while the median account age (orange) remains stable. If existing users were making a massive exodus and being replaced by new users, these numbers would be plunging. Instead, they paint a picture of a stagnating site, with a dominant base of long-term users, around since the beginning, who use the platform heavily, along with a high-churn cadre of new users since the start of the pandemic who try it out and soon leave.
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