For obvious reasons, Team Trump is trying to gaslight everyone into believing that more than half the U.S. population is not only on Twitter (X) but watched the Tucker interview with Trump.
Let’s start with the facts: the entire U.S. population is 333,287,557 (via the 2020 U.S. census). According to reports, only 23-25% of Americans are on X.
Yet Team Trump is crowing, variously, that 170 million, 180 million, 200 million, 230 million (more!) people watched the Tucker interview. Come on, that’s ludicrous on its face, right? Even the low-ball number makes zero sense.
Roughly 97% of households have at least one television, while only 23% of American adults use X. Heck, X, despite being a popular platform, doesn’t have the same reach as YouTube, Facebook, or even Instagram, which are used by 81%, 69%, and 40% of adults respectively.If half the country isn’t even on X, how is it possible for Trump’s interview to have so many views? Easy. That’s because the number of views attributed to a video includes those who watch the entire video, just a portion of it, or even scroll past it on their feed without even looking at it. Multiple views by the same user are also counted as unique views. You don’t have to take my word for it, either. That’s information coming straight from X.
As did I since I was tweeting the debate (that I was actually watching) and scrolling past the Tucker interview umpteen times under the #GOPDebate hashtag, seeing exactly zero percent of it. (I will watch it at some point, but it’s not high on my list of priorities.)
We can see the lack of actual views in the engagement.
“The Tucker Carlson Interview with me was a BLOCKBUSTER. Could hit 200,000,000 Views, and more!” Donald Trump posted on his social networking platform, Truth Social, on Thursday morning.Trump later claimed that, at 230 million views, the Carlson video was now: “The Biggest Video on Social Media, EVER, more than double the Super Bowl!” (For context, the 2023 Super Bowl was watched by more than 115 million viewers.)
Binder at Mashable continues:
Mashable can report that, as of the publication of this article on Thursday evening, Carlson’s Trump interview has received 14.8 million video views on X.. . . . To break down what this means for Tucker Carlson’s Trump interview: The video itself was actually played only 14.8 million times, for at least two seconds of the more than 46-minute interview — or just over six percent of the total 236 million times someone saw the post on X.. . . . According to media reporter Brian Stelter, the GOP debate itself averaged 12.8 million viewers on Fox News and its online streams during the two-hour broadcast. And, of course, cable ratings are counted differently than online video views. That number is how many viewers were watching within an average minute of content.Trump’s supporters, using X’s public view count data, have touted the Carlson interview as a big success. However, the real video view data – the numbers that Musk and company actively now hide from public view – paint a very different picture.
For our Only Trumper readers this means that Tucker’s Trump interview did garner more views than the GOP debate . . . by about two million views. Not by half (or two-thirds!) of the entire U.S. population. It’s still a win, just not the Trump deranged win that’s being touted by Team Trump.
Think of it this way:
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