Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
US, Dec 23 - Users are leaving the social network X in a kind of "digital exodus", long unhappy with the course taken by the platform since its owner, Elon Musk, took it over in 2022, and especially since he allied himself with former President Donald Trump, in the Republican's campaign in the last elections.
Musk acquired the social network Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. Although financially it is the businessman's biggest failure, since in two years its value has plummeted to about $9 billion, according to Forbes, the network has become a powerful loudspeaker for the billionaire's ideology and agenda.
X's relative decline
Although X users had long complained about the direction of the platform due to paid subscriptions, increasing advertising and the proliferation of 'ultra' profiles, Musk's active support for Trump in his 2024 election campaign seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Users and analysts have accused the billionaire of turning X into a disinformation machine in which falsehoods run rampant while promoting a far-right ideology.
One day after the election, more than 46 million people went to X (a record for the 'app' in 2024), but that same day more than 115,000 users closed their accounts in the US, according to estimates by the research firm Similarweb.
Although X does not provide the figures for the number of people who left it, from election day to Tuesday 12, Similarweb estimates that around 1.8 million people deactivated their accounts worldwide, including around 482,000 in the US.
Media outlets, journalists and artists seem to be the protagonists of this flight from X, from The Guardian, La Vanguardia or the American public radio NPR to a list of more than 60 renowned artists such as Guillermo Del Toro and Barbra Streisand, according to The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Although they are well-known names, it is far from being a mass flight: Musk's platform still has a large number of users and, according to the tracking website Exploding Topics, in October 2024 X had 600 million active users each month (who spend an average of 34 minutes a day on it). In addition, it remains the preferred network for institutional communication and for most media outlets.
Alternatives to X: Bluesky and Threads
Following the US presidential election in November, Bluesky claimed to have gained over 700,000 new users, reaching over 14.5 million globally and a 73% growth in daily active users, according to Similarweb.
However, the social media tracking website notes that the app remains a minor player as on its peak day the daily user count was about 1/3 of Threads' audience and about 1/20 of X's.
Bluesky's director of operations, Rose Wang, assured in an interview for EFE that her team partly expected the result obtained on the platform after the US elections.
However, she acknowledged that the app's growth has been "slow" with spikes, such as the million Japanese users who signed up the first week after its launch, or the Brazilian users it added between April and August, after X was banned in the country, according to Wang.
The app, announced in 2019 by Twitter's then-CEO Jack Dorsey, but made available to the public in February of this year, currently has more than 25 million users, according to the Bluesky User Count website.
For its part, the Threads platform, Meta's attempt to offer an alternative microblogging space for Musk, has reached more than one hundred million active daily users and more than 300 million monthly, as confirmed by its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on the application itself this Monday.
Mastodon, which does not have as much pull as the previous ones, has also grown since Musk bought Twitter: from 3.5 million in November 2022 to 9 million users in November of this year.
Not all alternatives to X have been a success: Pebble (formerly T2) closed this October and in April the founder of Post News, Noam Bardin, said that the application was not growing fast enough "to become a real business or an important platform." (Text and Photo: Cubadebate)
