Ever since Elon Musk started paying people to tweet, I have wondered whether trolling from a third world country would be a viable lifestyle choice when the ship goes down in Britain. Premium accounts get paid every two weeks and I generally make the best part of $100. Fifty dollars a week isn’t much, but I only have 60,000 followers and I don’t actively try to maximise my earnings. If I lived on a cheap beach in Indonesia, doubled my follower count, and put my back into engagement farming, I reckon I could survive by tweeting pictures of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer with words to the effect of “What do you think of this guy?”
I was having this conversation with my colleague Reem Ibrahim a few weeks ago and we ended up having a bet. We agreed to spend two weeks maximising our Twitter clout and whoever got the smallest payment at the end of it would use the money to buy us both a nice long lunch. I was feeling confident. I have three times as many followers and my last payout was $97 whereas Reem’s was just $27. Game on.
My interest in engagement farming piqued a few weeks earlier when I noticed various accounts tweeting: “A year ago, I was 100 per cent convinced Lucy Letby was guilty. A year later, I’m 100 per cent convinced she’s innocent. Anyone else?” The most successful of these tweets attracted half a million views and 1,500 replies. Not too shabby. The key words, I noticed, were “Anyone else?” The shrewd engagement farmer knows that it is not enough to say something provocative. He must also pretend that he is interested in the opinions of others.
Based on the assumption that engagement = replies, I decided that put questions at the heart of my farming efforts. On Day One, I asked people to nominate their worst Beatles song (52 replies, 10,000 views) and tweeted “A year ago, I was 100 per cent convinced Lucy Letby was innocent. A year later, I’m 100 per cent convinced she’s guilty. Anyone else?” The latter got 115 replies and 38,000 views, not a bad return but not championship winning stuff. Looking back, some of it was too clever by half. “Engagement farming should be banned. What do YOU think?” yielded only 14 replies and 6,100 views despite being accompanied by a photo of a kitten. My most successful tweet of the day was not a question at all, but a mildly interesting fact: “The ploughman’s lunch was invented by the Milk Marketing Board in the 1960s to sell more cheese.” (82 replies, 108,000 views).
Reem had the same idea, but gained more traction. “What’s one thing you’d like the Government to stop intervening in?” got her 81 replies, while “Abolish all tariffs, quotas, and subsidies. Do you agree?” pulled in 113 replies. But she had one trick up her sleeve that I hadn’t thought of. If you want engagement and can handle abuse, there is no better strategy than winding up pensioners. Reem went straight for the jugular: “Abolish the state pension.” This not only garnered her 1,200 largely hostile replies and 839,000 views, but gave her a bridgehead from which to launch further assaults on boomers in the days ahead.
In the first week, she posted banger after banger and she stayed on brand throughout. Two tweets about abolishing inheritance tax attracted 181 replies and 161,000 views between them. “Should we legalise cannabis?” gets 80 replies. An anti-NHS tweet pulls in a further 61 replies. “Should we abolish the state pension? Is the state pension sustainable?” gets 110 replies. “If immigrants weren’t entitled to taxpayer funded benefits or public services, would you still be anti-immigration?” gets 85 replies, although she made the rookie error of including a poll.
It seems that my young friend is a force to be reckoned with. After seven days, we exchanged analytics and it is clear that I must up my game. My 997,000 impressions pale before her 1.4 million, and her 3,775 replies make a mockery of my 1,766. It is not for want of trying on my part. I am using every trick in the book, from asking basic questions (“So, who are you going to vote for in the next general election?” — 83 replies 16,000 views) to drawing replies by making deliberate mistakes (“I’ve enjoyed an educational day of maritime history at Portsmouth’s famous docks, including HMS Victory from the famous Battle of Waterloo!”, but to no great effect (my nautical tweet gets a pitiful 24 replies). Even my interesting facts are getting limited engagement (“Syd Barrett got the riff for Interstellar Overdrive from hearing someone whistle the theme tune of Steptoe and Son.” — 18 replies, 10,000 views). It speaks volumes that my most successful tweet of the week is “My colleague Reem thinks the state pension should be abolished. What do you think — a sound move or a step too far?” (495 replies, 80,000 views). I am living off my colleague’s crumbs.
Reem is now more or less openly gloating at me on WhatsApp
Worse is to come in Week Two. Reem is still milking the anti-OAP angle. “For every nasty message I’ve had from pensioners this week, I’ve had supportive messages from young people tired of paying sky-high taxes” gets her 643 views and 240,000 views. A question as basic as “Should the state pension be means tested?” earns her 581 replies. Meanwhile I have been reduced to the likes of “The weekend starts here! What will YOU be doing?” (23 replies 8,300 views) and “There are some women on the telly trying to play rugby! Whatever will they think of next?” (17 replies, 8,200 views).
The killer blow comes when she starts an argument with former Reform MP Rupert Lowe who has suggested that people should be deported from the UK if they don’t speak English. Reem disagrees and quote-tweets Lowe with the question: “How many of the Brits moving to Dubai speak Arabic, do you reckon?” Her tweet is viewed a staggering 1.5 million times and draws 2,100 replies, mostly from people who broadly agree with Lowe’s take (“I couldn’t give a toss. It’s not our problem.”)
It looks bleak indeed for the @cjsnowdon X account. There is still plenty of time, but inspiration comes only occasionally and the returns are poor. A quick dunk on Tim Spector gets 52 replies. A dunk on Anna Soubry yields 14 replies. A mild dunk on Ed Davey yields 23 replies and 11,000 views. A stronger dunk on Richard Murphy does better, with 70 replies and 38,000 views. A photo of Hulk Hogan and Purple Aki in heaven goes straight over most people’s heads (4 replies, 3,500 views) while a photo of me enjoying the August sunshine accompanied by the question “Men, what is stopping you looking like this?” draws 77 replies, mostly from unkind people saying things like “Ozempic”, “exercise” and “self-respect”.
There is a glimmer of hope for Team Snowdon when the BBC uses two completely different artist’s impressions of an asylum seeker in court for sexually assaulting a schoolgirl. “This is meant to be the same person?” I ask unimaginatively, nevertheless grateful for the resulting 102 replies and 82,000. I unexpectedly benefit from a Dominic Sandbrook retweet after I mention Stanley Baldwin in a tweet about the European Court of Human Rights, but this stalls at 88,000 views and is chickenfeed compared with the kind of engagement Reem is getting from content she could put out in her sleep. After her Lowe triumph, she has taken her foot off the pedal somewhat but is still capable of such minimalist masterpieces as “Should we stop immigrants from being entitled to benefits?” (1,500 replies, 348,000 views) and “Genuine question — why are people still wearing face masks at airports?” (152 replies, 18,000 views).
Reem is now more or less openly gloating at me on WhatsApp (“The state pension stuff is absolute gold. You underestimated me.”) Pride comes before a fall, I tell her, and launch a final assault on my long-suffering followers, asking them to name their favourite Stone Roses song and claiming to have evidence that Lucy Letby has confessed (which she arguably has). Out of desperation, I resort to outright tweet-theft (“What’s a 10/10 British TV series?” — 144 replies) and ask my followers what song they want playing at their funeral (“My choice is “Whatta Man” by Salt-N-Peppa (featuring En Vogue)” — 93 replies, 14,000 views).
Reem’s last tweet before the Friday night deadline (“Is it wrong to fly the England flag?)” got a surprisingly weak response of 16 replies and 3,700 views, but it scarcely matters. When we exchange our final analytics, she is miles ahead, with 4.3 million impressions to my 2.7 million. Thanks to racists, pensioners and racist pensioners, she has had 10,000 replies while I am on barely 4,000. We will have to wait until Saturday to get the e-mail from Elon Musk’s people telling us how much we’ve earned, but it looks like a crushing defeat for old Snowy. The only consolation is that we’re spending whatever I make on a slap up dinner, as the Beano used to call them, so it’s not as if I’m going home empty-handed. And while my engagements were not enough to compete with the Ibrahim juggernaut, they were the best I have ever achieved and should amount to a princely sum.
Saturday comes around and the e-mail from X arrives, titled — as always — “You got paid!” But how much did I get paid? I open the e-mail. The answer is $97, exactly the same as last time. WTF? This isn’t what I signed up for when I was tweeting photos of Angela Rayner vaping in an inflatable canoe. I contact Reem whose email has not arrived yet. It takes several hours before it shows up and when it does, her payout is remarkable. Remarkably small, that is: $27, which is, again, exactly what she got last time when she wasn’t trying. It is barely enough to buy us a Happy Meal.
What can we learn from this? On the plus side, it looks like engagement farming doesn’t pay. Perhaps the algorithms are smarter than I gave them credit for. If so, it is good news for humanity. On the downside, it looks like I am going to have to keep working for a living.
