Twitter usage in US ‘fallen by a fifth’ since Elon Musk’s takeover

Use of Twitter in the US has slumped by more than a fifth since Elon Musk bought the site and rebranded it to X, according to data from app-monitoring company Sensor Tower.

As of February 2024, the social network’s daily app users in America had fallen by 23% since November 2022, just after Musk completed his takeover. Every other major social network experienced a reduction in the same period, but none by anywhere near X’s drop in user numbers.

The closest was TikTok, which fell by just short of 10%, while Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat all had user slumps of less than 5%, according to the data, first reported by NBC News.

Globally, X fared slightly better, dropping 15% of its users to hit 174 million daily active app users, according to Sensor Tower’s data. The analytics company does not track users who visit the social network through the web, nor those who use desktop apps, and relies on a number of sources to maintain an accurate panel of users to sample.

While X did not respond to a request for comment, the company implicitly rebuffed Sensor Tower’s claims in a public post. In an unsigned message, it said that “250 million people use X every day”, with 550 million visiting every month, and that “daily average time spent on platform” and “daily active user minutes” are both up year on year.

The fall in the value of the company has been reflected in assessments by the fund manager Fidelity, one of the investors in Musk’s buyout of the previously publicly traded company.

Fidelity’s blue chip growth fund, which holds its stake, has continuously marked down the value it attributes to the company, hitting its latest low of a 71.5% reduction in value from November 2022 to November 2023.

Since Musk paid $44bn for his stake, that brings Fidelity’s assessed value for the overall company to just over $12.5bn.

On Monday, a judge in California dismissed Musk’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit that has published reports chronicling the rise of racist, antisemitic and extremist content on the platform since Musk’s acquisition.

“Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose,” wrote Charles Breyer, the US district judge, in the ruling. “Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech.”