Trump Is Bragging About 100 Million Views for Tucker Carlson Interview – Here’s Why That’s Misleading
In a bout of counter-programming to the first Republican primary debate on Fox News, Donald Trump sat down with Tucker Carlson for an interview on the former Fox News host’s X show on Wednesday night, opting to skip the debate altogether. As has been the case with many of Carlson’s X episodes, the interview was quickly followed by a press release boasting “blockbuster” viewership that “completely overshadowed” the debate. As it turns out, looking closer at the numbers for the Trump interview tells a very different story.
Prior to the debate, Carlson boasted that viewership of his interview with Trump — who is due to be booked on his fourth indictment in Georgia on Thursday — would dwarf Fox News ratings, and superficially that prediction came true. As of this writing, the video has clocked more than 180 million views.
But, not so fast. Yes, 180 million is an amazing-sounding number. But as TheWrap explained back in June, it’s also almost meaningless.
According to the X (formerly Twitter) FAQ, which you can read here, practically anything 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,” the company says.
In other words, a view is counted even if you didn’t actively look at the post (formerly known as “tweets” before Elon Musk changed the site’s name to X) even if all it did was cross your screen while you were scrolling. Which by the way is a very likely occurrence on X’s algorithmic “For You” tab… especially if that tweet features content by users Twitter owner Elon Musk personally wants to boost.
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