UPDATE: Tracking Declining Activity on Twitter

Most accounts remained unchanged with a few becoming active but even more becoming inactive.

social media
digital policy
Author
Affiliation

Information Epidemiology Lab

Published

November 27, 2023

To see the previous report see: Tracking Declining Activity on Twitter.

This report summarizes recent changes in the status of influential Twitter accounts. The dataset categorizes account activity into labels like ‘1-Active’, ‘2-Not in last week’, ‘3-Not in last month’, ‘4-Not in three months’, ‘5-Not in six months’, with some accounts having additional notes such as ‘Still responds to customers’ or ‘Retweeting but no original posts’.

One new account was added, the business account for Taylor Swift, which a reader brought to our attention. That takes us from 119 last time to 120 accounts total. 63 are inactive in some form (whether that be inactive for over a week, a month, three months, or six months), which constitutes about 52.5% of the total accounts.

The percentage of active accounts has decreased slightly, from approximately 50.42% to 47.5%. Correspondingly, the percentage of inactive accounts has increased, from around 48.74% to 52.5%.

Generally these results shouldn’t be taken to mean more accounts than before have become inactive but rather that the accounts that were inactive in mid-November have largely remained so.

Account Updates

Disney, MGM, CBS, and Microsoft have all maintained their status as ‘Not Active in Over a Week’, which means they posted no original tweets in the over a week. However, each of these accounts has recently retweeted, which we added to their records.

Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13)

  • Previous Status: Not Active in the Last Week

  • Current Status: Active

  • Change Summary: Taylor Swift has posted a new pinned tweet on November 27, 2023, changing her account status to active.

Classification Changes

The following accounts have changed their status from active to not active in the past week:

  • BarackObama

  • ParamountPics

  • ExxonMobil

  • Instagram

  • WhatsApp

Data from November 27

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@article{infoepi_lab2023,
  author = {InfoEpi Lab},
  publisher = {Information Epidemiology Lab},
  title = {UPDATE: {Tracking} {Declining} {Activity} on {Twitter}},
  journal = {InfoEpi Lab},
  date = {2023-11-27},
  url = {https://infoepi.org/posts/2023/11/27-declining-activity-on-twitter},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
InfoEpi Lab. 2023. “UPDATE: Tracking Declining Activity on Twitter.” InfoEpi Lab, November. https://infoepi.org/posts/2023/11/27-declining-activity-on-twitter.