Global data created per year

As the world has created more data per year, people have sent more tweets per day, a correlation that is approximately as surprising as learning that rain correlates with wet streets. The coefficient is 0.955 across eight years, during which both metrics climbed with the inevitability of things that are essentially measuring the same phenomenon from different angles. Tweets are data. Data includes tweets. The correlation is almost a tautology, which makes it the most honest entry on this entire website.

The 2020 digital migration shows up in both numbers because it was the same migration. Lockdowns pushed work, education, socializing, and anxiety online — global data creation jumped sharply, and Twitter traffic did too as the world refreshed timelines for virus updates. They aren't two trends; they're one trend counted twice.

Eight years of global data and tweets growing together is the closest thing to a genuine causal relationship this site is likely to produce, which makes it simultaneously the least interesting and most honest correlation in the collection. The tweets are in the data. The data contains the tweets. It is correlations all the way down.