• by Colin Kirkland , Staff Writer, October 13, 2023

It’s no surprise that National Public Radio left X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter. In April, X owner Elon Musk labeled the publicly funded news entity’s main account as “state-affiliated media,” a tag applied to Russian and Chinese propaganda accounts. Musk then changed the label to “government-funded media” and did so without warning.

So NPR, which had 8.7 million followers, announced it would be shutting down its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the platform. Now, NPR is saying that its absence has had little to no effect on traffic to its site.

A memo sent around to NPR staff this week states that traffic has dropped by only one percentage point since it left Twitter/X, according to a new report from Nieman Lab.

“The platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

It turns out that Twitter/X had an insignificant effect on driving traffic to news sites. In fact, as the Nieman Lab report points out, investing in Twitter/X may not have been worth the effort.

Public-listener-supported news station KCUR in Kansas City left the platform the same week in April NPR left, along with other member stations, and has had a similar experience, with little to no change in web traffic since swearing off the Musk-owned platform.

“It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount,” KCUR audience editor Gabe Rosenberg told Nieman Lab, adding that the platform was more incremental in terms of reputation and credibility, since journalists and news outlets have often depended on Twitter/X to connect over breaking stories.

It turns out there are ways for news outlets to operate outside of Twitter/X without losing eyeballs.

News outlets like KCUR have forged other avenues of delivering breaking stories to its audience. When the Ralph Yarl shooting took place in Kansas City the same week KCUR left Twitter, the outlet created a live blog and posted to other social networks as NPR editors helped the station spread the story.

Once the story was out there, local Twitter users shared the piece across their networks and it circulated from there. Rosenberg told Nieman that this strategy allowed the outlet to reach new users on Instagram, where the station has “tripled down” its engagement efforts.

NPR’s recent memo also includes details about Twitter/X’s strain on its employees. Since its departure from the platform, the company says staff burnout has been on a decline: “That’s both due to the lower manual lift –– and because the audience on Threads is seemingly more welcoming to publishers than on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign,” wrote Danielle Nett, an editor with NPR’s engagement team.

That’s right -- NPR is using Threads, Meta’s three-month-old Twitter/X clone. And while NPR notes that Threads only delivers 63,000 site visits a week (about 40% of what Twitter provided), it says clicks aren’t its main priority. Instead, the organization is “taking advantage of the expanded character limit to deliver news natively on-platform to grow audiences––with enough information for a reader to choose whether to click through.”

But will Threads actually become a reliable X alternative for more news outlets? Threads has seen a major drop in users since its booming launch in July, and it has gotten flack for shying away from the proliferation of breaking news.

Last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tried to clarify Threads’ stance on the site’s “good vibes” approach to news, stating that it isn’t “anti-news,” but that the company wants to avoid its prior fumbles in spreading fake news.

As Threads continues to onboard new features and ride the line between facilitating engaging content and debate without delving into what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called “a negative and critical” experience on Musk’s app, , it will be interesting to see how many news outlets transition over from X.

Musk’s constant battering of the press –– along with his platform’s consistent spread of misinformation and amplification of paying users over all others –– may also help fast-forward the further departure of publishers from the site.

Already, Threads has attracted the attention of a quarter of X’s current active users. Without clicks being the main prize for news organizations like NPR and other publicly funded outlets, publishers’ social media strategies may change in some surprising ways.

As Nieman Lab stated in its report, “As a platform becomes less reliable –– either editorially or technically –– staying becomes more fraught. And as NPR has demonstrated, you may not be giving up all that much if you walk away.”