As COVID-19 began sweeping across the world last spring, Twitter experienced phenomenal growth with much of the planet’s population confined to their homes, helping the platform recover from a seven-year slump in daily tweet volume. As the pandemic has worn on, has Twitter continued to grow? How did the changes the platform made around the 2020 presidential election affect its growth and has its banning of Donald Trump caused it to lose users?
While Twitter itself does not publish detailed usage statistics, it is possible to estimate its growth from the daily random sample that it makes available of 1% of all tweets, which is highly correlated with its actual growth. Using this approach, the timeline below shows the estimated number of tweets per day on Twitter from Jan. 1, 2012 through Jan. 5, 2021 (gaps are days with missing data).
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