SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – It's been a roller coaster ride with Twitter in recent weeks. Between new CEO Elon Musk deactivating journalist accounts only to reactivate them again and publishing a poll where Twitter users resoundingly asked him to step down, things have been a bit unpredictable.
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Late Thursday, yet another new development was rolled out on the app. Twitter debuted a new feature – view counts. This could change a lot about how the platform functions.
This change could have two possible effects, according to Joshua Tucker, a New York University professor of politics and Co-Director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics.
One is relatively positive, and that has to do with transparency.
"For years all of those of us who have been doing research on the effects of Twitter, how Twitter is used, how Twitter interacts with politics, we've been doing it with kind of one hand tied behind our back because we've never known how often tweets are seen," he said.
Not knowing this crucial element has made it hard for researchers, journalists, and policymakers to gauge the effects of the app.
"It kind of rings true with some of Musk’s claims about, before he bought the platform, that he was going to try to introduce more transparency to the platform," said Tucker.
But while this could be a good move in that direction, there are some concerns about how it might impact some people’s goals to go viral.
This might change the content that some people produce and how people wind up interacting with the platform.
"We hear this idea about social media being addictive," said Tucker. "People get a rush from seeing their content spread far and wide."
While Twitter already has likes and retweets as a way to tell how popular a post is, the view counts will add another layer to what people can feed off of.
"Some other platforms have tried going in the opposite direction, giving people less information about how widely spread their content is," he said.
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