Users appear to be making yet another exodus from the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X , with other microblogging sites rocketing to the top of app download rankings and courting millions of new users in the week since the US election.
Whether users are permanently leaving X (formerly Twitter) or simply establishing new accounts elsewhere is unclear.
But brands and individuals alike are citing Musk’s substantial financial and rhetorical backing of Donald Trump in the US election as well as the polarising nature of the X platform as the reason for their departures.
Bluesky — originally a Twitter project that was spun off into its own company reported more than 1 million new users in the last week. It now has 15 million in total.
While it’s a minnow in the social media field, the platform has shot to top spot in Apple’s App Store rankings this week, just ahead of Instagram’s own X competitor Threads.
This is not the first time X has seen a decline in active users. Downturns notably happened after Musk took ownership of Twitter in October 2022 and when Brazil banned the platform this year.
But it looks as though Musk’s support for Trump has proven the final straw for certain account holders.
“This is kind of a tipping moment to some extent,” Bart Cammaerts, a communications and democracy researcher at London School of Economics, told DW.
Cammaerts points to the whittling down of moderation and the ramping up of Musk’s own rhetoric around X’s future direction as long simmering developments that may have helped to push users away.
“I think the fact that we see now so many people making that move is a combination of approaches that have been ongoing for longer than [the election]
Who’s leaving X?
On Wednesday, The Guardian newspaper said it would no longer post on X, though would not delete its accounts.
It is not alone in departing or downsizing its X presence. American media companies NPR and PBS stopped posting on the platform last year. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also downsized its dozens of X offerings to just four: news, sport, Chinese language and “masterbrand” profiles.
More notable have been celebrity exits. US actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Bette Midler have both deleted their X accounts while retaining presences elsewhere. They join previous X-iters like Elton John, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg and Gigi Hadid who left or stopped posting after Musk’s takeover in 2022.
Other public figures have vocalised their intent to leave X but have yet to delete their profiles. They include prominent media and political names like former CNN news anchor turned YouTube streamer Don Lemon and Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
There’s clearly a left-lean to the most vocal personalities to depart the platform.
But brands are leaving too — and from beyond the anglosphere. The Berlin Film Festival and Bundesliga team FC St Pauli are German brands that have announced their exit. Earlier in 2024, more than 50 other not-for-profits announced their departure via the campaign website byebyeelon.de.
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Last year, major brands halted advertising on the platform citing a rise in hateful content, drawing a public rebuke from Musk.
Why are they leaving?
Among the reasons cited for departing the platform is the continued increase in negative content on the platform.
That includes the increase of toxic content, remarked by The Guardian in its published statement as “the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”
But it might be difficult to pinpoint a single cause for the exit. The newspaper noted its decision had been a long time coming and that it resources could be “better used” elsewhere.
“News companies do not have unlimited resources, audiences do not have unlimited attention, so they might have to make a strategic decision if there is a platform that is associated to a high level of uncertainty when it comes to how the conversations will evolve in the short term,” Silvia Majo-Vazquez, a political communication researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told DW.
“They want to convert the audiences on social media platforms, [so] which audiences are you targeting right now on Twitter [X] with the drop of, also, [X] users?”
“Other platforms are gaining traction, so probably they’ll mobilise their resources to those platforms which provide new [groups] that are more difficult to reach — young audiences — and perhaps provide better environments.”
For individuals, many are remarking the “feel” of other microblogging outlets is like a Twitter of old, with fewer bots and more one-to-one interactions.
“If those functionalities can be offered by alternatives and enough people make that switch, it could go quite quickly. We’ve seen that also in the past with other platforms like Myspace, for example,” said Cammaerts.
Politics — and personalities — may keep migrating, discourse may minimise
As much as celebrities, politicians and brands may turn their gaze to new social pastures, upstart platforms are still vulnerable to the same negative interactions and toxic content prevalent on established social media.
“In a way people are going to the lesser of two evils because all these platforms have a business model that in essence is geared towards extraction, towards commodifying your sociality in ways contravening your privacy,” said Cammaerts.
“So, sure, X is the worst and is problematic for a number of political reasons, but it doesn’t mean that these other platforms are necessarily ‘the good’.”
The future direction of public discourse online is difficult to predict, but he believes it is a conversation that needs to start now.
“What do we want our democratic media environment to be? How do we want it to look? And can we, through democratic means, regulate it in such a way that it reaches that [democratic] ideal more than it does today? That can also be a contentious debate.”
It also assumes users will continue seeking “full view” public spaces to engage socially with each other.
Majo-Vazquez predicts the rise of closed groups on private messaging apps will continue to grow, pushing online interactions further away from the global public square Twitter originally aspired to.
“When it comes to social media platforms, the environment is getting more fragmented,” she said.
“The attention that those major platforms were receiving … has been fragmented to many other places. Which winner will come out of this process, we don’t know.”