Steven Pinker engagement report
@sapinker - 858K followers on X
Measured over 49 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 30, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 160 interactions against 858K followers, an engagement rate of 0.019%. Measured over 49 original posts, its engagement rate beats 44% of 3,882 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 33K times each, and 0.486% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 3.83% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 4.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 63% of days. Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 49 posts sampled, 22% carry an image or video, 18% are part of a thread and 80% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 47K interactions, about 296x its own typical post.
Measured over 49 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on August 30, 2026.
Compared with accounts its own size
Steven Pinker's engagement rate beats 44% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,882 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 9 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 32% 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 0.019%, Steven Pinker sits above the 25th percentile of the 37,701 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the below the median band, which runs 0.012% to 0.081%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.002% |
| 25th percentile | 0.012% |
| 50th percentile | 0.081% |
| 75th percentile | 0.439% |
| 90th percentile | 2.10% |
| 99th percentile | 156.3% |
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 13:00 UTC, and Friday 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% | 53K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 53K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 52K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 55K |
| 04:00 UTC | -6% | 44K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 43K |
| 06:00 UTC | -4% | 50K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 54K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 63K |
| 09:00 UTC | -3% | 72K |
| 10:00 UTC | -2% | 75K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 81K |
| 12:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 13:00 UTC | -2% | 98K |
| 14:00 UTC | -3% | 101K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 105K |
| 16:00 UTC | -4% | 102K |
| 17:00 UTC | -3% | 95K |
| 18:00 UTC | -1% | 88K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 83K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 77K |
| 21:00 UTC | -1% | 69K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 60K |
| 23:00 UTC | -2% | 53K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 238K |
| Monday | 0% | 302K |
| Tuesday | -3% | 302K |
| Wednesday | -1% | 257K |
| Thursday | -2% | 250K |
| Friday | -3% | 259K |
| Saturday | +3% | 233K |
Best tweets
- Aug 20, 2026296x their median
なんと動いてません https://t.co/On5qeeT6Y1
- Jan 26, 202655x their median
I spoke with @LaulPatricia about Marxism: One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism. And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer. One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist. The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial. So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth. Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit. Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals. And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.
- Aug 22, 202654x their median
If you're an academic (and can prove it with an ORCID), consider signing a petition protesting the University of Ghent's suspension of a postdoc for exposing academic misconduct, a blatant violation of academic freedom (as always, regardless of your agreement with all of the whistleblower's views). https://t.co/bkZ98z609Q https://t.co/UrjFnA93Sk
- Aug 20, 202614x their median
Is Biology Allowed to Explain Anything? Even a sex difference as obvious as throwing strength? Robert Deaner & Mike Lombardo: "The strong Blank Slate—the idea that human psychology is largely written by culture—has been declared dead many times. Yet it refuses to stay dead. ... Today, biology is usually acknowledged. Nature and nurture interact. Fine. But the Blank Slate survives through two recurring moves. First, reasonable observations—that traits are plastic, parents influence children, experience matters, and development mediates behavior—are treated as though they rule out an innate contribution. They do not. Second, evidence that could challenge a socialization-only explanation is ignored, minimized, or sidestepped." https://t.co/rTpWIA0BO1
- Aug 17, 202613x their median
"There’s a common view in left-wing and right-wing populisms that solving problems is very easy intellectually and you just need to defeat and disempower the bad people. This is not a view that would survive serious learning about the history of basically any policy topic. It’s actually quite hard to learn what works and why and to implement good ideas at scale. The Woke 1 problems of dogmatism, incuriosity, closed-mindedness, and sloppiness about the facts are not solved by switching the focus from identity to economics or by becoming right-wing. You need to actually behave less dogmatically, more curiously, more open-mindedly, and more rigorously, and I don’t see a lot of evidence that the discourse is moving in that direction." | Woke 1 is dead. We’ve learned nothing, by @mattyglesias https://t.co/flnKTmfIxV
- Aug 23, 202613x their median
Much of the vilification of Israel acting in self-defense is unjust, but the terrorism against Arab villages in the West Bank by settler thugs, tolerated by the Netanyahu government, is horrific. It deserves harsh criticism pressure to stop it. https://t.co/D6FTyNODZL
- Aug 11, 202612x their median
Non-heterosexuals tend to have worse mental health compared to heterosexuals. Is this due to minority stress–stigma and discrimination? In a new study, we should that the answer is “mostly not.” Link to the article in the next post, followed by an explanatory thread. (1/n)
- Aug 26, 20268.0x their median
R. I. P. Dolly Parton, possessor of many gifts, including wit. ("Dumb blonde jokes don't bother me because I know I'm not dumb and I know I'm not blonde.") I often quote her in my advice on the effort needed to write in clear and simple prose: "You wouldn't believe how much it costs to look this cheap." | Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80 https://t.co/5Nbgyvm6UF
- Aug 28, 20267.0x their median
"Trump and RFK Jr. are perpetuating the misunderstanding that cases of autism have been increasing in the population at an alarming rate, whereas what has happened is that diagnoses of autism are increasing in people who, in the past, would have been diagnosed with other conditions or missed altogether. They are now using this misunderstanding to scare people about vaccines, asserting that the artifactual increase in autism rates constitutes evidence of an epidemic produced by the harmful effects of vaccines. The results of this scientific illiteracy could be catastrophic." Why Autism Rates Are Rising—It Isn't the Vaccines https://t.co/84XvmmKbCR
- Aug 26, 20265.1x their median
https://t.co/zewsKa7wtt Hmm. I'd say the Enlightenment version of individualism is the historically unique idea that individuals exist not for the sake of their ruler, their class, their ancestors, their gods, or any other such superstition, but for their own sake. Meaning does not require subordination to something "greater than oneself". It is created by the idea that progress is possible and desirable – not by a leap to utopia, but endlessly into the future by undirected problem-solving, carried forward voluntarily by individuals for their own reasons.
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.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 160 interactions against 858K followers, an engagement rate of 0.019%. Measured over 49 original posts, its engagement rate beats 44% of 3,882 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 33K times each, and 0.486% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 3.83% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 4.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on roughly 63% of days. Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 49 posts sampled, 22% carry an image or video, 18% are part of a thread and 80% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 47K interactions, about 296x its own typical post.
- What is Steven Pinker's engagement rate on X?
- Steven Pinker (@sapinker) has an engagement rate of 0.019%, based on the median interactions across 49 original posts from the last 30 days against 858,423 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.019%, Steven Pinker sits above the 25th percentile of the 37,701 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 @sapinker have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 44% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (3,882 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 @sapinker post?
- Most posts go out around 13:00 UTC, and Friday is its busiest day, at roughly 4.37 posts per day across the measured window.