When it first launched in 2006, few could have imagined that X (formerly “Twitter,” formerly-formerly “Twttr”) would become one of — if not the — defining social media platforms of the aughts. With its deceptively simple premise of rapid-fire public microblogging, Twitter quickly blossomed into a communications juggernaut, able to move markets and influence elections. At the same time, it played host to an endless churn of in-jokes, breaking news moments, and discrete sub-cultures with their own rules and social structures. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it could be reasonably argued that Twitter has been perhaps the most consequential media invention of the past several centuries.
Then, in 2022, after months of public maneuvering and acrimonious legal wrangling, tech billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter for an astonishing $44 billion, wasting little time putting his personal imprimatur on the company he would ultimately rebrand simply as “X.” Since then, X has undergone a series of massive changes ostensibly to fulfill Musk’s vision of an “Everything App” that stands as a bastion of free speech. At the same time, Musk’s penchant for personal controversy and his foray into far-right electoral politics have drastically altered not only the company’s nuts and bolts operations but its place in the zeitgeist. As a result, 2024 has seen a mass X-odus from Musk’s walled digital garden and a reevaluation of where, if anywhere, users might go next.
‘A lot of elite tastemakers’
With Musk seemingly poised to play a major role in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, coupled with recent changes to X’s privacy rules that have made the site “less safe to use,” 2024 has seen a “new wave of X users looking to leave the platform,” The Verge said. “More than a quarter million” X users deleted their accounts after Election Day, searching for alternate social media platforms “like worried liberals threatening to decamp for Canada or Europe,” Business Insider said. And while not X’s first “mass migration,” this recent evacuation has featured a lot of “elite tastemakers.”
Citing “growing issues on X including bots, partisan advertisements, and harassment,” users flocking to alternate platforms “reached a tipping point when Donald Trump was elected president,” said NBC News.
The “benefits of being on the platform formerly called Twitter were now outweighed by the negatives,” said The Guardian last month in an announcement that it was suspending its official presence on X. Trump’s electoral victory and Musk’s role “served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.” As the “preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric” X “no longer serves the public interest at all,” The European Federation of Journalists president Maja Sever said in an announcement of that group’s decision to leave Musk’s site, as well.
For anyone who “deplores Trump’s reelection” as well as “Musk’s own degradation of public discourse with racism, antisemitism, misogyny, union-busting, endorsements of violence, the spreading of hateful untruths, and all-around vulgarity,” the question over the past year has become: “why do you still maintain an account on Twitter?,” said The New Republic‘s Timothy Noah.
‘Every bit as indispensable to the political conversation’
X’s quickening departures have “exploded into an exodus to Bluesky,” the microblogging alternative founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has since left the company, Forbes said. Bluesky now boasts some 20 million users, “with a large number of celebrities and news publishers leading the way.” Among those leaving X are Black users, a demographic that “make[s] up some of social media’s most engaged, influential audiences” for whom “Black Twitter” — the name given to an “unofficial group of users self-organized around shared cultural experiences” — may “become a thing of the past as more users move to alternative text-based social media apps,” NBC News said.
Although Musk’s tenure at Twitter may have been financially detrimental (estimates claim its value has dropped 80% from Musk’s purchase price) “in the 2024 election, Twitter seemed every bit as indispensable to the political conversation as it was in 2020 and 2016,” Farhad Manjoo said at Slate. X-odus or not, now that Musk has “parlayed his role at Twitter into control of a president and enduring political movement, can anyone say his money was misspent?”