Today, we’re adding Instagram and Reddit to the Timeline widget, expanding its real-time social tracking capabilities. With X already live, this update brings us one step closer to a full “God’s eye” view of how stories evolve across the web and social media over time.
These two networks bring a unique new perspective to the Timeline view. Users interested in Reddit will be able to monitor real-time story evolution on the internet’s front page, and watch as conversation evolves — with discussion often continuing long after it has faded from the shorter attention spans of other platforms.
When it comes to Instagram, it’s best known as a platform to follow cultural discussions and influencer trends, and Spike users will be able to do that via Timeline. The platform’s relevance in the mainstream news space is also significant, and Timeline will now offer a 360-degree view into that engagement with this update.
So, plenty to be excited about (without even mentioning the upcoming TikTok and Facebook editions on top of this) but how about seeing it in action, alongside our Timeline stalwart networks of web coverage and X posts?
To do that we’ll look at one of the big stories across multiple platforms — a back and forth about whether the government was going to spend millions on armored Teslas. The analysis will show why each platform is crucial to the understanding of the story’s spread, with every one having a distinct timeline, narrative, and level of audience engagement.
Let’s take a closer look.
What happened with the armored Teslas?
Before we start, we need some context for this story. Drop Site News reported on February 12th that the government had predicted that a contract of $400 million of armored vehicles was likely to go to Tesla, in a forecast last updated in December 2024. This caused a lot of engagement on social media, as narratives spread across different platforms and evolved as new information came to light.
The new, enhanced Timeline below shows the story’s cross-network performance over the two-day period around its breaking, from February 12th to February 14th. It first captured public attention on X and Reddit, before moving into mainstream reporting and reaction the next day. On day three, it saw a secondary spike on X as the story received pushback from conservative commentators.
A back and forth on X
Ryan Grim — a co-founder of Drop Site News — first posted the story to his X account just before 4pm on February 12th, where it immediately began to drive engagement.
It grew quickly there, with 13,000 engagements on posts within just three hours of publication. Its influence then extended beyond the platform when it appeared as part of Rachel Maddow’s evening show on MSNBC. This coincided with it reaching its day-one peak of more than 9,000 engagements per hour that same evening, emphasizing the feedback loop that can be created between media ecosystems.
With increased attention came increased criticism, and some reinforced that the forecast had last been updated in December when Biden was still president, and therefore had nothing to do with cost-cutting measures influenced by the Musk-adjacent Department of Government efficiency.
Day two of the story saw the peak in post volumes on X, with an hourly high of 229 posts after the forecast disappeared from the original government document — again reported by Grim — though engagement with this update was lower than in the initial spike in reporting.
The biggest spike in public interest actually came two days after the initial news broke, when figures such as Charlie Kirk and ProudArmyBrat pushed back once more on Maddow’s coverage of the forecast, with more than 70,000 engagements with the counter-narrative that this was a December forecast and had nothing to do with current proposals.
An elongated discussion on Reddit
The other platform where interest spiked almost immediately was Reddit, where the Drop Site story was shared widely on the likes of r/RealTesla, r/inthenews, and r/somethingiswrong2024. Within the first three hours, these were three of around 50 posts about the controversy, with more than 5,000 engagements on those first three hours’ worth of reactions.
What’s interesting about Reddit in comparison to X though is that even as new posts decreased with time, and indeed had almost stopped the third day of coverage, engagement actually increased as the hours went on, reaching a peak well into the next day, as news continued to evolve and debate extended into the following days.
Some of the top posts on February 13th came from r/ThereWasAnAttempt and r/reactiongifs, as well as updated story info from r/RealTesla, though even with that update the top comments remained skeptical. Interest peaked at almost 5,000 engagements per hour, more than double the day-one peak.
Now we’ve looked at the two networks that had the fastest reaction to the news, let’s look at those that took a little longer to get going.
Mainstream news was slower to capture attention
Web and Instagram were both slower to react than X and Reddit, and peaks in public interest weren’t reached until February 13th, once the contract had already been put on hold. The top story came from NPR, and focused on the Trump administration stating it had no intention to fulfill any contract with Tesla.
Interest faded away after a day or so, having also taken a while to ramp up, so on the web this really was a 24-hour whiplash narrative.
Instagram mirrors the web coverage, but with higher engagement
On Instagram, engagement also reached its peak almost 24 hours after the news actually broke.
That being said, its hourly peak of 32k engagements was higher than any of the platforms we looked at here, and the overall levels of engagement were also at their highest on Instagram. As a platform, it still has the potential to be very influential, albeit on a slight delay compared to X and Reddit.
The post that mostly drove that engagement came from UC Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, whose post accused the administration of a lack of transparency after the original document posted by Drop Site was edited.
This post alone saw more than 73k engagements on the platform.
A God’s-eye view of unfolding media coverage
A story like this illustrates why the ability to monitor multiple networks simultaneously is indispensable in a fractured media ecosystem — especially when those stories are constantly shifting and evolving.
Each platform not only had its own distinct timeline of engagement, but also its own unique narrative focus and audience reaction. X served as the origin of the story and offered rapid commentary, while Reddit saw extended discussions that evolved over days. The mainstream web offered more measured, traditional coverage, and Instagram drove the highest engagement through influential voices.
Without tracking these networks in real time, observers could miss crucial pieces of the story’s development across different platforms and audiences. A single-platform perspective might have suggested the story died down after 24 hours, while missing the sustained Reddit discussions, or the delayed but significant Instagram impact. NewsWhip’s new God’s-eye view reveals the complexity of modern news dissemination and public discourse, where stories don’t just travel linearly but ripple across networks in intricate patterns, each adding its own layer to the broader narrative.
To find out more about how these features can fit into your workflow and help you get the full picture, get in touch with us here.
