WHEN the official Twitter feed announced the microblog's IPO in November, around 8,000 followers retweeted the news the following week. Barely 50 of them were German. According to Semiocast, an analyst, Germany ranks 31st worldwide in terms of public tweets, with 59m per year. Germany's 82m people have just 4m Twitter accounts. That puts it 22nd in the world, behind not only European neighbours like Britain (population 63m, 45m accounts) or Spain (population 47m, 16m accounts) but also Turkey (population 75m, 11m accounts) and the Philippines (population 98m, 8.6m accounts).

Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, does not hold an official Twitter account. Peer Steinbrück, Mrs Merkel's vanquished opponent in September's general election, has only 60,000 followers. Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, has over 265,000. A debate between Mrs Merkel and Mr Steinbrück ahead of the general election in August generated 200,000 tweets. Last year's final French election debate yielded half a million. German companies use Twitter to disseminate information but rarely interact with customers. Twitter trails heavyweights like Facebook, YouTube and Google+, but also local brands such as Wer-kennt-wen and VZ-Netzwerke (clones of Myspace and Facebook, respectively).

So why aren't Germans tweeting? It's not for the want of tech-savvy citizens: more than 97% of Germans surf the web for at least 30 minutes each day. A quarter spend four hours a day or more online. Berlin has a thriving tech hub dubbed "Silicon Allee", where Twitter opened an office earlier this year and which around 500 digital startups have made their home.

All this suggests that the reasons for Twitter's German angst are cultural rather than technological. Some have suggested the German language makes tweeting tricky. Germans like to make a point clear, experts say, though this seems often to call for protracted, convoluted sentences with multiple subordinate clauses that are inimical to microblogging. "It's certainly harder to fit a thought in German into 140 characters," says Marcel Weiss of Neunetz.com, a technology-news website, "but it is not impossible." A book, "Das Leben in 140 Zeichen" ("Life in 140 Characters"), is a popular compendium of witty German tweets. Germans have also embraced texting, which involves similar linguistic constraints to microblogging, with gusto.

A more likely reason is Germans' preoccupation with privacy. Many recall the Stasi, communist East Germany's prying secret police which had at one point recruited or coerced 173,000 people to be its informants. This explains Germans'—and the Merkel government's—outcry over allegations of America's widespread electronic snooping.

"A German tourist in Amsterdam will marvel at the huge, transparent windows of Dutch houses," says Johannes Passmann, a social-media expert at the University of Siegen. This, he thinks, helps explain why the Dutch have as many Twitter accounts as Germans, who are five times more numerous: "The Dutch open concept of privacy makes it way easier to use Twitter meaningfully." Philip Stapelfeldt, a 22-year-old web designer from Monheim-am-Rheine, near Düsseldorf, is exactly the sort of young, connected professional you would expect to revel in social media. He has never been tempted by Twitter. "I don't want people to know what I do in my spare time," he says.

At first blush all this looks hard to square with the country's 25m Facebook accounts (even Mr Stapelfeld has a Facebook profile, albeit under a pseudonym). But unlike Twitter, designed to broadcast information to anyone willing to listen, Facebook originally served (and can still be configured) to whisper thoughts to a select group of kith and kin. Clearly, such intimate exchanges, even if technologically mediated, offend Teutonic sensibilities less than spouting witticisms.