Why I think Twitter’s new “View Count” will reveal fake accounts on the platform

Twitter has announced a new feature , View Count that shows the total number of times a Tweet has been viewed. “With view counts,” the company’s support page explained in a blog post, “you can easily see the reach of your Tweets and the Tweets you see on the Timeline.”

Elon Musk, who earlier announced he will resign as CEO “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job,” also confirmed this in a tweet, and as at the time this article was written, 38.1 million accounts had seen his tweet. 

Before now, Twitter has a feature that shows you more about how your tweets are doing than just how many likes, retweets, and quotes they get.

“View Tweet Analytics”, which is next to a tweet you posted, helps you see how people interacted with it. You can also see the total impressions, which is defined as “the number of times this Tweet was seen on Twitter.”

So what’s makes the “View Count” feature different?

When users see how many times a tweet has been seen, they will have a better idea of how far and how much the content has on other people.

Musk thinks that this could make more people want to join in the tweet, considering his statement that “over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.”

View counts will be a useful metric for advertising agents to assess the reach and interaction with their sponsored content on the platform.

Even if engagement rates don’t tell the whole story, knowing how many impressions other people’s tweets get might aid businesses in identifying true influencers in their industry.

Like someone tweeted, “If a celebrity or “journalist” has 2 million followers and barely gets any views on their tweets because they purchased 1.9 million fake followers in order to appear to be A-List. This will expose lots of fake followers purchased by so called media stars and celebs. 🤣”

Twitter has said that View counts can be seen by everyone, and not just the account that tweeted. Public view counts has the ability to expose accounts that artificially inflate their engagement and number of followers.

Time will tell who on Twitter has a legit following and who has a lot of bots pretending to be followers, which is why Elon Musk almost gave up his purchase of the company.

It will take some time for View Count to get to all users, so some accounts may not have access to it just yet. This feature is already accessible on iOS and Android, and it will be added to the web version in the near future.

The company specifically mentioned “Community Tweets, Twitter Circle Tweets and Older Tweets” won’t show view counts, and that it may take up to a minute after a Tweet is posted for the count to show.

Twitter also said viewing a tweet count from a computer and later a phone will be seen as more than once and calculated as multiple views. “Not all views are unique,” it expressed.