Trump Makes Totally Meaningless Claim His Tucker Interview Received 100 Million Views In Four Hours

Former President Donald Trump, who skipped Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate to join Tucker Carlson for some counter-programming, claimed early Thursday morning he eclipsed all of television.

“President Donald J. Trump’s blockbuster interview with Tucker Carlson is premiering on the platform,” read a release from his campaign PAC.

“The post garnered over 124,400 reposts and over 439,500 likes—completely overshadowing all of television programming on Wednesday night,” the statement added.

However, “100 million views on X” in no way amounts to 100 million people watching the interview, nor is it an indication that more people watched the interview than watched the GOP debate on Fox News.

A “view” on Twitter, now known as X, simply is a record of each time a person (or bot) scrolls past a tweet. The platform explains on its own website, “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view, regardless of where they see the Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, etc.) or whether or not they follow the author. If you’re the author, looking at your own Tweet also counts as a view.”

Notably, the count does not indicate who actually watched the interview and will also count the same person viewing the tweet multiple times. Twitter dropped its “video view” count in early summer, in what critics argued appeared to be a gambit to hide key data from advertisers.

“Multiple views may be counted if you view a Tweet more than once, but not all views are unique. For example, you could look at a Tweet on web and then on your phone, and that would count as two views,” adds Twitter’s website.

As of Thursday midday, the Tucker interview had some 625,000 likes and 167,000 shares, evidence that the interview is gaining some traction, but by no means an impressive figure for a Trump interview. However, even those numbers on the platform are difficult to fully digest given that many accounts on the platform do not actually represent real people.

Mashable, last week, published a report looking at Elon Musk’s followers on Twitter and found a large percentage of them to likely be fake:

A quick summary of some of Musk’s follower data for those who haven’t read the more detailed report: Just over 42 percent of Musk’s more than 153 million followers have 0 followers. More than 40 percent have zero tweets posted on their account. Around 40 percent of Musk’s followers also follow less than 10 users. This points to a few things. Many of these accounts can be fake accounts or bots.

So, while Musk’s view count appears that Tucker and Trump are racking up huge numbers – over 200 million as of publication – the true number of how many real people actually watched the interview remains unknown.