Twitter hits record high as Black Lives Matter protests dominate news

Twitter downloads skyrocketed this week as people around the world presumably wanted a way to keep up with mass protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

TechCrunch noted that Twitter set daily download records according to two different analytics firms, Sensor Tower and Apptopia. The former measured more than a million Twitter app installs on Monday, while the latter said the social media app was installed almost 700,000 times on Wednesday.

Both figures were called single-day records according to both firms’ metrics. While there’s obviously a disparity between the two analytics firms’ data, the point remains that lots of people are downloading the Twitter app at a time when it’s arguably the best way to absorb everything that’s happening at the moment. 

Twitter still gives users the option to easily sort new content chronologically, even after Facebook and Instagram abandoned the idea in favor of algorithmic timelines. Anyone who uses Twitter with a chronological timeline has likely seen countless videos of police brutality over the past week and breaking COVID-19 news over the past few months.

Twitter’s been a useful resource for anyone trying to stay informed, even if its site policies are regularly and visibly flawed. And as the numbers reported by Sensor Tower and Apptopia show, hundreds of thousands of people seem to agree.