The deluge of goodbye messages from individuals leaving X started shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory final week. In explaining their resolution, many within the exodus cited the identical factor: The big help Elon Musk, the social media service’s proprietor, gave the Republican candidate in the course of the marketing campaign and the growing nastiness on his website.
Jody Avrigan, a podcast host and media producer with 50,000 followers on X, mentioned on rival social media service Threads, that he was performed utilizing X, as a result of “Elon Musk is a pretty destructive force in our society and politics, I want no part of him.” Nicole Wallace, an anchor on MSNBC with over 1 million followers on X, mentioned on reside TV that she’d “deleted Twitter today as an act of self preservation.” Tee Wattress mentioned on Threads she’d been on X for 15 years sharing comedic takes on popular culture and actuality TV, however “to see it turn into the hell scape that it is today has been devastating.” Even the writer and really energetic X person Stephen King joined Threads, telling his 7 million X followers that he was leaving the platform. “Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.”
The big variety of individuals swearing off X for different providers could spell the top to social media as we all know it. As an alternative of simply of a tiny variety of extraordinarily widespread websites for posting information, opinions, and memes, as has been the case for greater than a decade, a variety of new choices are gaining hundreds of thousands of customers, such Threads, owned by Fb mother or father Meta, and Bluesky.
Each day customers of X, beforehand referred to as Twitter, have declined constantly since Musk acquired it in 2022. Final yr, it had roughly 250 million day by day energetic customers and Musk claimed that the whole would develop to 1 billion in 2024. On election day final week, X had solely 162 million day by day customers—and even that was a yearly excessive, based on Sensor Tower, a market intelligence agency that tracks the platform. A day later, that quantity had already dropped by 5 million, to 157 million day by day customers.
Underneath Musk’s possession, X has misplaced a median of 14% of its customers month-to-month, based on Sensor Tower. Regardless of the slight enhance in day by day customers on the day of the election, an “elongated slide in active users” has continued, Sensor Tower’s analysis lead Seema Shah instructed Fortune.
Shortly after taking on X, Musk made main modifications to the platform to advance what he described as “free speech,” whittling down the lots of of individuals that after labored on content material moderation for Twitter to only a handful of contract staff, reinstating brazenly white supremacist or in any other case vitriolic personalities, and boosting solely accounts that paid to be verified, successfully gamifying the whole platform. He additionally tilted the algorithm to favor inflammatory posts and conservative flash factors, gleefully becoming a member of the fray himself, typically passing alongside political and racial conspiracy theories to his 200 million followers.
Late within the latest presidential marketing campaign, Musk overtly joined forces with Trump by campaigning for him and donating closely to make sure a Trump victory, utilizing X as a instrument to that finish. He has since been by Trump’s aspect in Florida and has been rewarded by the President-elect because the co-head of the proposed Division of Authorities Effectivity, which shares an acronym with a cryptocurrency Musk typically promotes.
For a lot of customers, such a platform, no matter it might have as soon as been, is now not enjoyable or helpful. And it’s set off the newest refrain of individuals proclaiming their exit from X—for good this time, even when many have determined to maintain their accounts reside, however vow to not put up something extra on them.
“There has been a steady drift away from X for a while,” Jonathan Bellack, senior director of Harvard College’s Utilized Social Media Lab that’s a part of the Berkman Klein Heart, instructed Fortune. “And yes, we’re seeing more people doing it more loudly at the moment, but people have been leaving for months and months. Now, I wonder if people are choosing to leave because of their beliefs, or because the experience on the platform has gotten worse.”
This X diaspora has coincided with the rising affect of different types of media, like podcasts, long-form video, group chats, and feedback sections on YouTube and Discord, as an illustration. It’s additionally come amid the growing adoption of newly-founded social media platforms. Right now, many public personalities and journalists—lengthy the spine of Twitter and X—put up the identical factor throughout Threads, Bluesky, and X, hedging their bets on what could go viral the place.
For years, Twitter loved close to immunity from new rivals as a result of its community impact was so sturdy. The extra individuals who used it, the extra helpful it turned and the extra others due to this fact wished to affix. That flywheel spun for a very long time, retaining social media startups and even behemoths like Meta, from even making an attempt to instantly compete. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg quipped a decade in the past that Twitter was “a clown car that drove into a goldmine.” When Musk began to take the wheels off of Twitter, Zuckerberg put 15 engineers to work constructing a veritable clone now referred to as Threads.
No matter individuals’s causes for leaving X, the 2 most probably locations for individuals to land is both Threads or Bluesky, a startup initiated by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Each platforms debuted final yr and are at present jockeying for first and second place in Apple’s App retailer for most-downloaded free apps within the U.S. TikTok and WhatsApp, additionally owned by Meta, are within the prime 10 as properly. In the meantime, X is in twenty ninth place, behind different social apps like Fb and Instagram, each owned by Meta.
No third social gathering analysis service tracks when customers delete an app from their cellphone. However SimilarWeb discovered that no less than 115,000 customers deactivated their X accounts through the online the day after the latest election. That very same day, Google Search curiosity within the phrase “Delete X” rose 150% and has continued to develop by double digit proportion factors every day since, based on Enormous, a design and know-how firm that conducts customized analysis. Even information outlet The Guardian mentioned this week it was abandoning all 80 of his official accounts, with a collective 27 million followers, as a result of enhance in “disturbing content promoted or found on the platform.”
One other knowledge level is anecdotal: Over the previous week, many prime X customers say they’ve misplaced important numbers of followers, starting from dozens to lots of and even hundreds. Brent Troderian, who has over 150,000 followers on X, mentioned on Threads that he’s misplaced about 1,000 followers for the reason that election. One other well-known determine on X, Aaron Rupar, who writes a publication on politics and media, mentioned he hemorrhaged 10,000 of his almost 1 million followers final week. “While I’m not above a bad tweet or two, I don’t think it’s anything I posted,” he wrote.
Though there was hypothesis on-line that a few of these declines could possibly be associated to bots or inauthentic accounts all of the sudden leaving or being deleted from the platform, there isn’t a clear proof to help the notion.
In any case, such follower losses coincide with progress in exercise on rival platforms. New customers of Threads within the final month grew 394% yr over yr, based on Sensor Tower. Meta mentioned in October the service had reached 275 million month-to-month energetic customers. Adam Mosseri, the pinnacle of Instagram who additionally oversees Threads, mentioned Thursday that the platform had added one other 15 million customers to this point in November, and was “going on three months with more than a million sign ups a day.”
Whereas Bluesky has far fewer customers, it’s been a trending subject on X and Threads during the last week as individuals mentioned the place there have been heading whereas leaving X. For the reason that election, it has added nearly 1 million new customers, to a complete of almost 15 million.
TikTok, Fb, Instagram, and Snapchat have all added customers as properly every month during the last yr, from 3% to 10%, based on Sensor Tower.
Regardless of all the obvious momentum away from X, and the manipulation of its content material algorithm in favor of right-wing politics and Musk himself, no less than among the individuals who could also be leaving X are being changed by new customers. It’s doable there’s a form of swap occurring—use amongst individuals fed up with the pro-Trump drift and Musk’s omnipresence is, to some extent, being coated by people who find themselves attracted to precisely that.
“Although X has experienced this elongated decline in overall US active users over the past few years, it has seen a sizable uptick in new users, or those who had previously never registered a session on X,” Shah of Sensor Tower instructed Fortune.
In accordance with Sensor Tower, new cellular app customers for X jumped 17% in October, among the many few notable will increase it’s seen since Musk’s takeover.
Whereas this isn’t sufficient to offset X’s sustained loss in customers since Musk’s acquisition, the general migration amongst social media platforms is an element and parcel to a brand new period of on-line fragmentation. This on-line splintering is taking with it among the cultural and media energy that had coalesced round what was Twitter, based on Bellack of Harvard, and it’s probably that nobody platform or kind of media will take up that place ever once more.
“Twitter always had a level of influence that was disproportionate to its number of users – it had a public square feeling, yes, but there’s no reason that’s the only way social media can work,” Bellack mentioned. “People leaving X, the fragmentation and people sorting themselves in other places, it’s just reinforcing the notion that there will no longer be one definitive platform, and that’s probably a good thing.”
Are you a tech worker or somebody with perception or a tip to share? Contact Kali Hays securely by means of Sign at +1-949-280-0267 or at kali.hays@fortune.com.
