Twitter Use in United States Stagnant Since 2016 Election -- No Trump Bump, According to SimilarWeb

Twitter! Thanks to Donald Trump, who effectively runs much of his presidency on the social network, up to and including actually threatening countries with war on it, Twitter is almost always front page news, every day, seemingly every hour. How this hurts or benefits the United States is another discussion, but according to data analytics company Similarweb, there's one particular US institution it's not benefiting much at all -- Twitter itself. Or to be more specific, Twitter's US usage:

Data courtesy SimilarWeb

US web and mobile traffic to Twitter peaked during the November 2016 election, to over 250 million daily visits, but has been trending downward ever since, typically falling well below 200 million daily visits.* This data contradicts Twitter's last quarterly report of net active growth, but the data Twitter has publicly released makes it ambiguous where in the world that growth is coming from. And according to SimilarWeb, it's not happening in the United States.

This data may come as a surprise to the many US Twitter users on the left who have been calling for Twitter to simply suspend Trump's account for violating its Terms of Service, which forbids threats of violence and other bad behavior he's engaged in -- a request that Twitter the company has steadfastly refused. The common assumption has been that Trump's activity on Twitter drives usage, especially in the US. However, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Twitter is currently profitable, so another dynamic seems to be happening:

Via ABC & actual President of the United States

While Trump's Twitter usage doesn't actually grow US visits to Twitter, it does reliably keep Twitter itself in the news, enabling the company to position itself as a major US media source. Which in turn, makes it seem like a primary target for advertisers. At the same time, that very media coverage pretty much insures Trump's Twitter usage won't grow visits -- since after all, if you're not a Twitter user already, why bother using it now, since you can just see the latest, most outrageous tweet on, well, pretty much any news site you visit? 

*Another notable point in the chart above: Twitter purged over 70 million accounts between May and June, but that's not reflected in Similarweb's data. This suggests, Russian bots and other bad actors aside, those purged "users" are old accounts that weren't active, primarily paid for following real users and so on.

Comments

[David Cartier]

It shouldn't be any wonder. There are very few Trump supporters, let alone conservatives and libertarians with a Twitter account anymore. It's been very common, on Twitter, to be banned or have your account frozen, simply for posting something that supports our Constitutional rights, or is pro-life, pro-Israel or even conservative leaning. There are other venues now that allow people to post whatever they please, and don't go shadow banning anyone because of their political beliefs.

[Hamlet Au]

Got a source from a reputed news site for any of these claims?

[metacam oh]

David above is confusing Russian bot accounts with Conservatives. I don't blame him, they both parrot the same shit.