Nate Silver, a statistician and not a journalist by profession, has recently made waves with his critique, overshadowing years of similar grievances from the press sector. In a detailed piece released this week, he assessed X as nearly useless for following breaking news, such as wars, last-minute revelations, and real-time crises. He argues that the platform’s algorithm consistently suppresses posts that contain external links.

A mere few hundred likes despite 53 million followers

The case of the New York Times starkly illustrates this issue. Despite having 53 million followers on X and world-renowned journalists breaking major news stories, their posts often garner less than 400 interactions (including likes, shares, and comments). In contrast, Globe Eye News, a news aggregator with no editorial team or journalists, has fewer than one million followers yet regularly secures over 8,000 engagements per post. This aggregator never includes links, while the Times includes them in 88% of its posts.

The Nieman Lab, affiliated with Harvard, employed Claude to analyze the 200 most recent tweets from 18 major media accounts and evaluate their engagement.

The findings are clear: traditional media outlets use many links and engagement is nearly non-existent.

Fox News, the outlier who cracked the code

For Fox News, only 9% of its tweets include an external link. Instead, they feature embedded videos, images, and native graphics. The network enjoys the third-highest engagement rate in the sample, trailing only Globe Eye News and Leading Report, another aggregator that doesn’t use URLs.

Nikita Bier, a product manager at X, responded to the criticisms by attacking the quality of the Times’ tweets rather than defending the algorithm. He advised media outlets to produce thoughtful content instead of merely posting a sentence with a link.

The root of the issue lies in the economic model

Subscription-based models now dominate the English-speaking press, requiring them to draw readers back to their sites. Without traffic, subscriptions and therefore revenue are lost. Adapting one’s content to fit the retention strategies of X—which altered users’ feeds with its translation—means undermining the very funding structure on which journalism relies.

In 2016, Parse.ly pointed out that news often originated on Twitter. X continues to generate minimal traffic as before. Now, it also hinders the real-time flow of information. The media have lost both functions over the past decade, with no formal announcement ever made.