Nicholas Kristof engagement report
@NickKristof - 1.8M followers on X
Measured over 70 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 31, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 380 interactions against 1.8M followers, an engagement rate of 0.021%. Measured over 70 original posts, its engagement rate beats 58% of 3,791 tracked accounts of a similar size, which puts it in the middle of its size range rather than at either end. Posts are seen about 35K times each, and 1.10% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.93% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 6.7 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 70% of days. Most posts go out around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 70 posts sampled, 30% carry an image or video and 71% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 116K interactions, about 306x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #rsf, #iran, #storytelling.
Measured over 70 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 31, 2026. Recurring tags: #rsf, #iran, #storytelling.
Compared with accounts its own size
Nicholas Kristof's engagement rate beats 58% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,791 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 10 of 10)). A percentile is spread evenly by construction, so 50 really is the middle of that group and 90 really is its top tenth.
On engagement per impression rather than per follower it beats 59% of the same group. When those two numbers disagree, the gap is about how far its posts travel rather than how people react to them.
Where this sits in the catalog
At 0.021%, Nicholas Kristof sits above the 25th percentile of the 36,654 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the below the median band, which runs 0.012% to 0.08%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.002% |
| 25th percentile | 0.012% |
| 50th percentile | 0.08% |
| 75th percentile | 0.433% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 160.5% |
This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built
Posting timing
This account posts most often around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC | -1% | 51K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 52K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 50K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 53K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 43K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 42K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 48K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 52K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 61K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 70K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 72K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 78K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 86K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 94K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 97K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 101K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 98K |
| 17:00 UTC | -2% | 91K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 85K |
| 19:00 UTC | -1% | 80K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 74K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 66K |
| 22:00 UTC | -1% | 57K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 52K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +4% | 231K |
| Monday | 0% | 288K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 278K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 251K |
| Thursday | -1% | 245K |
| Friday | -3% | 253K |
| Saturday | +3% | 227K |
Best tweets
- Aug 5, 2026306x their median
To those who say "it's her choice" I used to say the same thing about my own Hijab. I was covered head to toe. Even on the beach. Even with my male relatives. And when people challenged me, I said: this is my choice. You know why? Because the other option was burning in hell, hung by my hair for eternity. That's what they taught me since childhood. Yes, let me repeat it for you to just understand about our version of “freedom of choice.” I grew up in an Islamist culture that gave me two options. Cover yourself and go to heaven. Or don't cover, and be hanged by your hair and burned in hell. Like when someone puts a gun to your head and says "you can go left or right", technically, yes, that's a choice. I picked heaven. I called it freedom. And I believed it, because that's what happens when fear is all you've ever known. And if you think I shouldn't be telling you my story, I don't care. I really, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, don't care. The women still living under that "choice"? I care about them. #LetUsTalk
- Aug 13, 2026151x their median
The White House normally gets $2.5 million a year for maintenance. Trump’s team has allocated $875 million. That’s 350 years’ worth of the usual budget spent by a single administration.
- Aug 18, 202629x their median
Last week I posted a new paper with Patrick Norrick: “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World.” We chose the title deliberately. No society in history has experienced the fertility levels now seen in South Korea, China, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, and many other countries. Our knowledge of the causes (and of the economic consequences) remains far more limited than most public discussion acknowledges. Much of what we write is, at best, educated conjecture. The paper also struggles against a space limit. We wrote 20,000 words, far from the 250,000 or so we would need to address some issues in more detail (if I had the time and resources to hide away for a year, I could do that, but not now). That means some ideas are only sketched. Nonetheless, we emphasize several important points. First, fertility has fallen very fast everywhere: rich and poor countries, east and west, north and south, conservative and liberal societies, religious and non-religious societies (with the exception of the Jewish population of Israel; fertility has also collapsed among the Muslim population within the pre-1967 borders), you name it. Even in sub-Saharan Africa we see fast and unprecedented drops in fertility (alas, from a high initial level). Second, and this is really interesting, the fertility collapse has been concentrated in poor and lower-middle-income countries much more than in rich countries. By now, income per capita and fertility are positively correlated within OECD countries. We conjecture this will hold globally in a few decades. Third, and related to the second point, the fertility collapse has been concentrated among poor and lower-middle-income women within countries. In countries such as the U.S., the rich and highly educated now have more children than the poor and less educated. Fourth, we document why we do not understand the data from the U.N. World Population Prospects. See, for example, Tables A.1 and A.2. Fifth, we explain why some proposed mechanisms struggle when confronted with the data. A more subtle point is at work here. Many commentators do not seem to understand the difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Yes, births might have gone down because fewer women are in long-run relationships. That is the proximate cause. But you need to explain why fewer women are in long-run relationships (the ultimate cause), and saying that they spend more years in school, to take one example, does not get us very far. Why do they spend more years in school? Once you start down the whole chain of reasoning, things become much harder than they seem. The paper can be found here: https://t.co/VrCHr0lBPa Comments always welcome!
- Aug 18, 202627x their median
IDF marks Palestinian detainees with numbers as it expands northern West Bank operations. MK Ahmad Tibi wrote, 'An image reminiscent of dark periods, and one that should shock everyone' https://t.co/RIxx4uMlwr
- Aug 25, 202623x their median
BREAKING: Trump administration says it might demolish the Kennedy Center if court blocks renovations. https://t.co/OiYBRSEavf
- Aug 15, 202619x their median
We no longer have a carrier presence in the Pacific… The debate about the food aboard the Lincoln and now the George Washington is largely a red herring. Arguing about food substitutes an emotional argument for a stark practical one. The real issue is how the war on Iran is burning through equipment and people. I.e., now the Lincoln, along with the Ford, will most certainly undergo maintenance for an extended period because of the length of their deployments in support of the war in Iran. Those deployments will also hurt retention (this was a major issue during the Iraq War in particular; remember stop loss?) And the question is: for what? It’s not like they were chasing the Imperial Japanese Navy across the Pacific following an attack like Pearl Harbor. Now the Administration, despite all the warnings about Taiwan and a China-focused National Security Strategy, is moving our only carrier out of the Pacific. This is a major strategic signal, coming on the heels of news that we’ve burned through other major capabilities such as interceptors, radars, stand-off munitions, and a large chunk of the MQ-9 fleet, among other things. It is clear that the Iran war is not only detrimental to US national security, but a potential strategic blunder worse than Iraq if we don’t cut bait; and this is the conversation pro-war types want to avoid at all costs. https://t.co/4Bl6wEhpxM
- Aug 13, 202612x their median
NEW: The U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the war with Iran, or roughly 25 percent of its fleet, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The high-demand drones cost between $30 million and $50 million a piece. w/ @noahjrobertson https://t.co/qoEH0KPBrk
- Aug 19, 20269.2x their median
"Luttig...regards the [presidential] immunity decision as 'one of 2 or 3 worst in American history, if not the single worst, because of the structural damage it did to the Constitution and separation of powers.'" https://t.co/yPeBS8oT55
- Aug 30, 20267.9x their median
Palestinians now control just eight per cent of the land in the West Bank. “92 per cent of the land for 50 per cent of the people—how is that sustainable?” a policy fellow who has been mapping Israeli settlements said. https://t.co/SRit8ZoZrB
- Aug 16, 20267.0x their median
President Trump has kicked 1.5 million children off food stamps over the last year; I saw the pain everywhere on a 1,000-mile road trip. But I also saw heroism: local food pantries, teachers, churches and others trying desperately to push back the night. https://t.co/p1rGUwofNc
Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.
Recurring topics
The most frequent hashtags in the sampled posts. They describe what this account writes about; they are not a performance signal, and the catalog-wide breakdown on the hub shows how little hashtag count moves.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 380 interactions against 1.8M followers, an engagement rate of 0.021%. Measured over 70 original posts, its engagement rate beats 58% of 3,791 tracked accounts of a similar size, which puts it in the middle of its size range rather than at either end. Posts are seen about 35K times each, and 1.10% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 1.93% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 6.7 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 70% of days. Most posts go out around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 70 posts sampled, 30% carry an image or video and 71% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 116K interactions, about 306x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #rsf, #iran, #storytelling.
- What is Nicholas Kristof's engagement rate on X?
- Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) has an engagement rate of 0.021%, based on the median interactions across 70 original posts from the last 30 days against 1,799,530 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.021%, Nicholas Kristof sits above the 25th percentile of the 36,654 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
- Does @NickKristof have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 58% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,791 accounts), which puts it in the middle of its size range group. Ranking inside a size band matters because engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly re-measure the follower count. It is a starting point for a look at follower quality, not a verdict on it.
- When does @NickKristof post?
- Most posts go out around 14:00 UTC, and Tuesday is its busiest day, at roughly 6.7 posts per day across the measured window.