X (former Twitter) user participation and down-scaling capacity have become recent topics. Last weekend, Nikita Bill, head of X-product, and Nate Silver, data analyst, debated whether X could still bring traffic to publishers. Subsequently, the Nieman Press Laboratory released a report on Wednesday that adding a link to the X post would reduce the amount of interaction. On Thursday, well-known digital rights organizations and the non-profit organization EFF (eFront Foundation) announced their departure from platform X on the grounds that the returns from the post were diminishing. The EFF social media manager, Kenyatta Thomas, in his blog, stated that the withdrawal from the X platform, which had been in use for almost 20 years, was not a “discretionary decision” of the head and that, in the long run, data no longer supported the continuation of X.
She noted that in 2018, the EFF posted on Twitter received 50 million to 100 million hits per month; in 2024, the EFF published 2,500 posts, with only 2 million views per month; and last year, 1,500 posts were published about 13 million times. “To be honest, today less than 3 per cent of a single tweet seven years ago has been viewed by an X post.”
EFF will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other open social networks in the future, emphasizing that the choice of a platform to send a message does not imply endorsement of the platform service. “We stay because the users of these platforms should have access to information. We stayed because some of our most read posts were critical of the platform itself. X is no longer the focus of public opinion.”
EFF is one of the many organizations that have withdrawn from X in recent years, following the departure of NPR (National Public Radio of the United States), PBS (Public Broadcasting Corporation of the United States), the Guardian, Le Monde and many other media outlets, as well as scholars, celebrities and local governments. The reasons for leaving X varied, but the flow might have supported them.
The Guardian announced in 2024 that it would no longer update.
Any source of traffic is valuable to publishers at a time when consumer behaviour is changing online. The increased use of AI is taking away the flow of publishers, while the number of recommendations received by news stations from search engines and Facebook is declining. This situation has forced a number of newsrooms to close down or downsize as a result of financial pressure. In the debate between Nikita Bill and Nate Silver, the former accused the newsroom of wrongly using X. He stressed that news media, such as The New York Times, should post in a way that encouraged discussion, not just X as a news release, and that the title and link should be dropped.
But Silver says, “Even though I did put more effort into producing an electronic newspaper that generated a lot of discussion on X, the effect of turning it into an out-of-station flow is very general. A Silver Bulletin article may have only 2-3 per cent readership conversion rate, compared to 1 per cent before. Before that, Twitter brought us 15 percent of the traffic.”
Even Silver’s critics seem to agree with his assessment of X. Social media has become a weird show, X is now dominated by the conservative Red Net, and many highly interactive top-level account outputs are of poor quality (Silver points out that the number of net red accounts that are known for spreading conspiracy theories exceeds the New York Times). Mask refuted this analysis and responded by stating that Silver was “bullshit”.
It is worth noting that the analysis by the New York University ‘ s Nehman News Laboratory of 18 large-scale recent 200 posts generally supports the view of Silver. The analysis found that the number of interactions with links in X tweets was low. This does not necessarily mean that X is downgraded, but it just means that X is not as hot as it used to be.