Exploring the Czech Twitterverse: Who's who on this growing social platform?

Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter will undoubtedly affect the Czech Twittersphere. The social media app is among the most popular communication applications in Czechia, with a growing number of users.

This summer, the number of Twitter users in Czechia exceeded 1 million, according to June 2022 data from mediaguru.cz – a notable increase from 786,000 users in early 2022.

Although not as popular as Facebook and Instagram, with 6.8 million and 3.6 million users respectively (according to digital-marketing firm NapoleonCat), Twitter maintains a strong influence in the current affairs, news-reporting, and political spheres of Czechia.

“Twitter is the number one social network of Czech politicians,” reported mediaguru.cz, with the highest levels of politics-related posts on the platform. Data from end-2020 shows that Jiří Dolejš from the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia was the most active Czech politician up until that period, with the highest number of tweets.

Tomio Okamura of the Freedom and Direct Democracy party, Miroslav Kalousek (TOP 09), and Patrik Nacher (ANO) are also among the most active users of Twitter. Prime Minister Petr Fiala has over 275,000 followers on Twitter – several times greater than his Instagram following.

Czech Twitter appears to be a story of men in large cities. Analytics show that Twitter’s community is predominantly male-dominated; 870,000 members are male, compared with just 230,000 female users. The majority of accounts are concentrated in big cities: Prague and Brno together comprise about 86 percent of all users nationwide, according to mediaguru.cz. 

Czech companies (such as technology, energy, banking, automotive firms etc.) are highly active on Twitter, as are public and governmental institutions to help keep the public informed. Twitter is the most popular form of communication for such uses – the official Twitter account of the Czech government has over 167,000 followers, for example.

Musk's takeover of the Twitter platform is already creating ripples throughout the Czech Twitterverse: Journalist Filip Horký (144,000 users follow his breaking news tweets) recently encouraged followers to join him on Telegram.