The New York Times printed several charts about Twitter "blue checks," and they aren't one of their best efforts (link).
Blue checks used to be credentials given to legitimate accounts, typically associated with media outlets, celebrities, brands, professors, etc. They are free but must be approved by Twitter. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he turned blue checks into a revenue generator. Yet another subscription service (but you're buying "freedom"!). Anyone can get a blue check for US$8 per month.
[The charts shown here are scanned from the printed edition.]
The first chart is a scatter plot showing the day of joining Twitter and the total number of followers the account has as of early November, 2022. Those are very strange things to pair up on a scatter plot but I get it: the designer could only work with the data that can be pulled down from Twitter's API.
What's wrong with the data? It would seem the interesting question is whether blue checks are associated with number of followers. The chart shows only Twitter Blue users so there is nothing to compare to. The day of joining Twitter is not the day of becoming "Twitter Blue", almost surely not for any user (Nevetheless, the former is not a standard data element released by Twitter). The chart has a built-in time bias since the longer an account exists, one would assume the higher the number of followers (assuming all else equal). Some kind of follower rate (e.g. number of followers per year of existence) might be more informative.
Still, it's hard to know what the chart is saying. That most Blue accounts have fewer than 5,000 followers? I also suspect that they chopped off the top of the chart (outliers) and forgot to mention it. Surely, some of the celebrity accounts have way over 150,000 followers. Another sign that the top of the chart was removed is that an expected funnel effect is not seen. Given the follower count is cumulative from the day of registration, we'd expect the accounts that started in the last few months should have markedly lower counts than those created years ago. (This is even more true if there is a survivorship bias - less successful accounts are more likely to be deleted over time.)
The designer arbitrarily labelled six specific accounts ("Crypto influencer", "HBO fan", etc.) but this feature risks sending readers the wrong message. There might be one HBO fan account that quickly grew to 150,000 followers in just a few months but does the data label suggest to readers that HBO fan accounts as a group tend to quickly attain high number of followers?
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The second chart, which is an inset of the first, attempts to quantify the effect of the Musk acquisition on the number of "registrations and subscriptions". In the first chart, the story was described as "Elon Musk buys Twitter sparking waves of new users who later sign up for Twitter Blue".
The second chart confuses me. I was trying to figure out what is counted in the vertical axis. This was before I noticed the inset in the first chart, easy to miss as it is tucked into the lower right corner. I had presumed that the axis would be the same as in the first chart since there weren't any specific labels. In that case, I am looking at accounts with 0 to 500 followers, pretty inconsequential accounts. Then, the chart title uses the words "registrations and subscriptions." If the blue dots on this chart also refer to blue-check accounts as in the first chart, then I fail to see how this chart conveys any information about registrations (wbich presumably would include free accounts). As before, new accounts that aren't blue checks won't appear.
Further, to the extent that this chart shows a surge in subscriptions, we are restricted to accounts with fewer than 500 followers, and it's really unclear what proportion of total subscribers is depicted. Nor is it possible to estimate the magnitude of this surge.
Besides, I'm seeing similar densities of the dots across the entire time window between October 2021 and 2022. Perhaps the entire surge is hidden behind the black lines indicating the specific days when Musk announced and completed the acquisition, respectively. If the surge is hiding behind the black vertical lines, then this design manages to block the precise spots readers are supposed to notice.
Here is where we can use the self-sufficiency test. Imagine the same chart without the text. What story would you have learned from the graphical elements themselves? Not much, in my view.
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The third chart isn't more insightful. This chart purportedly shows suspended accounts, only among blue-check accounts.
From what I could gather (and what I know about Twitter's API), the chart shows any Twitter Blue account that got suspended at any time. For example, all the black open circles occurring prior to October 27, 2022 represent suspensions by the previous management, and presumably have nothing to do with Elon Musk, or his decision to turn blue checks into a subscription product.
There appears to be a cluster of suspensions since Musk took over. I am not sure what that means. Certainly, it says he's not about "total freedom". Most of these suspended accounts have fewer than 50 followers, and only been around for a few weeks. And as before, I'm not sure why the analyst decided to focus on accounts with fewer than 500 followers.
What could have been? Given the number of suspended accounts are relatively small, an interesting analysis would be to form clusters of suspended accounts, and report on the change in what types of accounts got suspended before and after the change of management.
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The online article (link) is longer, filling in some details missing from the printed edition.
There is one view that shows the larger accounts:
While more complete, this view isn't very helpful as the biggest accounts are located in the sparsest area of the chart. The data labels again pick out strange accounts like those of adult film stars and an Arabic news site. It's not clear if the designer is trying to tell us that most of Twitter Blue accounts belong to those categories.
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See here for commentary on other New York Times graphics.