Elon Musk’s X bleeds users into Threads and Bluesky. Welcome to an era of social media fragmentation

Jody Avrigan, a podcast host and media producer with 50,000 followers on X, said on rival social media service Threads that he was done using X because “Elon Musk is a pretty destructive force in our society and politics, I don’t want any part of him.” Nicole Wallace, an MSNBC anchor with over 1 million followers on X, said on live television that she had “deleted Twitter today as an act of self-preservation.” Tee Wattress said on Threads that she had been at X for 15 years, sharing comedic takes on pop culture and reality TV, but “watching it turn into the hellscape it is today has been devastating.” Even author and very active X user Stephen King joined Threads and told his 7 million X followers that he was leaving the platform. “Tried to stay but the atmosphere just got too toxic.”

The sheer number of people banning X from other services could mean the end of social media as we know it. Instead of just a small number of extremely popular sites for posting news, opinions and memes, as has been the case for more than a decade, a number of new options are gaining millions of users, e.g. Threads owned by Facebook parent Meta , and Bluesky.

Daily users of X, formerly known as Twitter, have declined consistently since Musk acquired it in 2022. Last year, it had approximately 250 million daily active users and Musk claimed that total would grow to 1 billion by 2024. On Election Day last week, X had just 162 million daily users — and even that was an annual high, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm that tracks the platform . A day later, that number had already dropped by 5 million to 157 million daily users.

Under Musk’s ownership, X has lost an average of 14% of its users each month, according to Sensor Tower. Despite the small increase in daily users on Election Day, a “long-term slide in active users” has continued, Sensor Tower’s head of research Seema Shah said Assets.

Shortly after taking over X, Musk made major changes to the platform to promote what he described as “freedom of speech,” cutting the hundreds of people who once worked on content moderation for Twitter to just a handful of contract employees and openly reinstating white supremacy . or otherwise nefarious personalities, and only boosting accounts that have paid to be verified, effectively gaming the entire platform. He also tilted the algorithm to favor inflammatory posts and conservative flashpoints, gleefully joining the fray himself, often relaying political and racial conspiracy theories to his 200 million followers.

Late in the recent presidential campaign, Musk openly aligned himself with Trump by campaigning for him and donating heavily to ensure a Trump victory, using X as a tool to that end. He has since been by Trump’s side in Florida and has been rewarded by the president-elect as co-head of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, which shares an acronym with a cryptocurrency that Musk often promotes.

For many users, such a platform, whatever it once was, is no longer fun or useful. And that has sparked the latest chorus of people proclaiming their exit from X — for good this time, though many have decided to keep their accounts alive but vow not to post about them anymore.

“There’s been a steady drift away from X for a while,” said Jonathan Bellack, senior director of Harvard University’s Applied Social Media Lab, part of the Berkman Klein Center. Assets. “And yes, we’re seeing more people making it more vocal 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 become worse.”

This X-diaspora has coincided with the increasing influence of other forms of media, such as podcasts, long-form videos, group chats and comment sections on YouTube and Discord, for example. It has also come amid the increasing use of newly founded social media platforms. Today, many public figures and journalists—long the backbone of Twitter and X—post the same thing across Threads, Bluesky, and X, hedging their bets on what might go viral where.

For years, Twitter enjoyed near immunity from new rivals because its network effect was so strong. The more people used it, the more useful it became and the more others would therefore join. That flywheel spun for a long time, preventing social media startups and even giants like Meta from even trying to compete directly. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated ten years ago that Twitter was “a clown car that drove into a gold mine.” When Musk began taking the wheels off Twitter, Zuckerberg put 15 engineers to work building a veritable clone now known as Threads.

Regardless of people’s reasons for leaving X, the two most likely places for people to land are either Threads or Bluesky, a startup initiated by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Both platforms debuted last year and are currently tied for first and second place in Apple’s App Store for the most downloaded free apps in the US. TikTok and WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, are also in the top 10. Meanwhile, X is in 29th place behind other social apps such as Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta.

No third-party research service tracks when users delete an app from their phone. But SimilarWeb found that at least 115,000 users deactivated their X accounts online the day after the last election. That same day, Google Search interest for the phrase “Delete X” increased 150% and has continued to grow by double-digit percentage points every day since, according to Huge, a design and technology firm that conducts custom research. Even the Guardian news outlet said this week it was suspending all 80 of his official accounts, with a combined 27 million followers, due to the increase in “disturbing content being promoted or found on the platform.”

Another data point is anecdotal: Over the past week, many top X users say they’ve lost a significant number of followers, ranging from dozens to hundreds or even thousands. Brent Troderian, who has over 150,000 followers on X, said on Threads that he has lost about 1,000 followers since the election. Another well-known figure on X, Aaron Rupar, who writes a newsletter about politics and the media, said he bled 10,000 of his nearly 1 million followers last week. “While I’m not above a bad tweet or two, I don’t think it’s something I posted,” he wrote.

While there has been speculation online that some of these drops could be related to bots or fake accounts suddenly leaving or being deleted from the platform, there is no clear evidence to support the notion.

In any case, such follower losses coincide with growth in activity on rival platforms. New Thread users in the last month grew 394% year-over-year, according to Sensor Tower. Meta said in October that the service had reached 275 million monthly active users. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, which also oversees Threads, said Thursday that the platform had added another 15 million users so far in November and was “going through three months of more than a million sign-ups a day. “

While Bluesky has far fewer users, it has been a popular topic on X and Threads for the past week as people discussed where they were going while leaving X. Since the election, it has added almost 1 million new users, for a total of almost 15 million.

TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have also added users each month over the past year, from 3% to 10%, according to Sensor Tower.

Despite all the apparent momentum away from X and the manipulation of its content algorithm in favor of right-wing politics and Musk himself, at least some of the people who might be leaving X are being replaced by new users. It’s possible that some kind of swap-use is going on among people tired of the pro-Trump drive, and Musk’s omnipresence is somewhat covered by people drawn to just that.

“While X has seen this prolonged decline in total active users in the US over the past few years, it has seen a significant increase in new users or those who had never previously logged a session on X,” said Shah of Sensor Tower. Assets.

According to Sensor Tower, new mobile app users for X rose 17% in October, among the few notable increases it’s seen since Musk took over.

While this isn’t enough to offset X’s continued loss of users since Musk’s acquisition, the overall migration among social media platforms is part of a new era of online fragmentation. This online splintering takes with it some of the cultural and media power that had gathered around what was Twitter, according to Harvard’s Bellack, and it is likely that no platform or type of media will regain that position.

“Twitter has always had a level of influence that was disproportionate to its number of users – it had a sense of public space, yes, but there’s no reason that’s the only way social media can work,” said Bellack. “People leaving X, the fragmentation and people sorting elsewhere, it just reinforces the notion that there’s no longer going to be one definitive platform, and that’s probably a good thing.”

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