Elon Musk’s X is hemorrhaging users to Threads and Bluesky. Welcome to the 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 want no part of him.” Nicole Wallace, an anchor on MSNBC with over 1 million followers on X, said on live TV that she’d “deleted Twitter today as an act of self preservation.” Tee Wattress said on Threads she’d been on X for 15 years sharing comedic takes on pop culture and reality TV, but “to see it turn into the hell scape that it is today has been devastating.”

The large number of people swearing off X for other services may spell the end to social media as we know it. Instead of just of a tiny 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, such Threads, owned by Facebook parent Meta, and Bluesky.

Daily users of X, previously known as Twitter, have declined consistently since Musk acquired it in 2022. Last year, it had roughly 250 million daily active users and Musk claimed that the total would grow to 1 billion in 2024. On election day last week, X had only 162 million daily users—and even that was a yearly 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 monthly, according to Sensor Tower. Despite the slight boost in daily users on the day of the election, an “elongated slide in active users” has continued, Sensor Tower’s research lead Seema Shah told Fortune.

Shortly after taking over X, Musk made major changes to the platform to advance what he described as “free speech,” whittling down the hundreds of people that once worked on content moderation for Twitter to just a handful of contract employees, reinstating openly white supremacist or otherwise vitriolic personalities, and boosting only accounts that paid to be verified, effectively gamifying the entire platform. He also tilted the algorithm to favor inflammatory posts and conservative flash points, gleefully joining the fray himself, often passing along political and racial conspiracy theories to his 200 million followers.

Late in the recent presidential campaign, Musk overtly joined forces 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 the co-head of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, which shares an acronym with a cryptocurrency Musk often promotes.

For many users, such a platform, whatever it may have once been, is no longer fun or useful. And it’s set off the latest chorus of people proclaiming their exit from X—for good this time, even if many have decided to keep their accounts live, but vow not to post anything more on them.

“There has been a steady drift away from X for a while,” Jonathan Bellack, senior director of Harvard University’s Applied Social Media Lab that’s part of the Berkman Klein Center, told Fortune. “And yes, we’re seeing more people doing it more loudly 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 gotten worse.”

This X diaspora has coincided with the rising influence of other forms of media, like podcasts, long-form video, group chats, and comments sections on YouTube and Discord, for instance. It’s also come amid the increasing adoption of newly-founded social media platforms. Today, many public personalities and journalists—long the backbone of Twitter and X—post the same thing across Threads, Bluesky, and X, hedging their bets on what may go viral where.

For years, Twitter enjoyed near immunity from new rivals because its network effect was so strong. The more people who used it, the more useful it became and the more others therefore wanted to join. That flywheel spun for a long time, keeping social media startups and even behemoths like Meta, from even attempting to directly compete. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg quipped a decade ago that Twitter was “a clown car that drove into a goldmine.” When Musk started to take the wheels off of Twitter, Zuckerberg put 15 engineers to work building a veritable clone now known as Threads.

Whatever people’s reasons for leaving X, the two most likely places for people to land is either Threads or Bluesky, a startup initiated by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Both platforms debuted last year and are currently jockeying for first and second place in Apple’s App store for most-downloaded free apps in the U.S. TikTok and WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, are in the top 10 as well. Meanwhile, X is in 29th place, behind other social apps like 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 via the web the day after the recent election. That same day, Google Search interest in the phrase “Delete X” rose 150% and has continued to grow by double digit percentage points each day since, according to Huge, a design and technology company that conducts custom research. Even news outlet The Guardian said this week it was abandoning all 80 of his official accounts, with a collective 27 million followers, due to the increase in “disturbing content promoted or found on the platform.”

Another data point is anecdotal: Over the past week, many top X users say they’ve lost significant numbers 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’s lost about 1,000 followers since the election. Another well-known figure on X, Aaron Rupar, who writes a newsletter on politics and media, said he hemorrhaged 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 anything I posted,” he wrote.

Although there has been speculation online that some of these declines could be related to bots or inauthentic 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 users of Threads in the last month grew 394% year over year, according to Sensor Tower. Meta said in October the service had reached 275 million monthly active users. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram who also oversees Threads, said Thursday that the platform had added another 15 million users so far in November, and was “going on three months with more than a million sign ups a day.”

While Bluesky has far fewer users, it’s been a trending topic on X and Threads over the last week as people discussed where there were heading while leaving X. Since the election, it has added almost 1 million new users, to a total of nearly 15 million.

TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have all added users as well each month over the last year, from 3% to 10%, according to Sensor Tower.

Despite all of 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 may be leaving X are being replaced by new users. It’s possible there is a sort of swap going on—use among people fed up with the pro-Trump drift and Musk’s omnipresence is, to some extent, being covered by people who are attracted to exactly that.

“Although X has experienced this elongated decline in overall US active users over the past few years, it has seen a sizable uptick in new users, or those who had previously never registered a session on X,” Shah of Sensor Tower told Fortune. 

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

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

“Twitter always had a level of influence that was disproportionate to its number of users – it had a public square feeling, yes, but there’s no reason that’s the only way social media can work,” Bellack said. “People leaving X, the fragmentation and people sorting themselves in other places, it’s just reinforcing the notion that there will no longer be one definitive platform, and that’s probably a good thing.”

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