X, formerly known as Twitter, is potentially facing a mass exodus seen coming from a mile away. You need only look at the political division, the prevalence of AI, and blue tick bots plaguing comment sections to understand why.
Owner Elon Musk’s close relationship with President-elect Donald Trump has also cemented the platform as a safe place for MAGA supporters, turning hairline cracks into echo chamber valleys.
Users are vocalizing their discomfort, writing posts calling X “a cancer” where “there are no repercussions to violent threats.” Part of the paradigm shift can be blamed on the emboldened misogyny and threats in the days following Trump’s victory.
Women are flocking to safer waters after encountering viral “your body, my choice” rhetoric, and many Democrats feel that some posts made by outspoken Trump supporters are more aligned with Truth Social, an “alt-tech” platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group.
Data from September 2024 proves it’s not all about the November election results, however. The Financial Times reported X had lost users in two crucial markets: the U.S. and the U.K. Nearly one-fifth of its daily active users in the U.S. were bled, and one-third in the U.K.
The slow decline could speak to a number of factors, including an increasingly incendiary “for you” algorithm that feeds users engagement-farming content, pervasive negativity on the site, and low-quality advertisements.
John Burn-Murdoch added that the U.K. users sticking around to share political content, in particular, were “socially conservative Brits.”
Anyone in democratic spaces on X with like-minded mutual followers has probably seen multiple posts in the last week or so from users saying goodbye. Many people are choosing to switch over to the X competitor Bluesky.
While escaping X’s toxicity will feel like a relief, there is a danger of creating an even more divisive social landscape. Jemima Kelly wrote in the Financial Times, “The problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorizing and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber.”
Whatever way you slice it, people are becoming less likely to debate in good faith, and less likely to be swayed from their viewpoints. The lack of engagement could lead to an even greater threat of isolation than the one we currently face.
Ironically, Musk himself warned of this in the past, before shaping X into the doom-scrolling hellscape it has become. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he wrote in Apr. 2022.
The question is, can any platform be politically neutral if it is willing to uplift extreme voices, especially ones that threaten civil rights? Furthermore, is the reprive of Bluesky worth the cost of the far right sowing itself further into the minds of individuals who aren’t exposed to opposing views?
It’s all but impossible to convince people who feel deflated post-election to stay on a platform that is almost certainly detrimental to their digital well-being. But accepting that the two sides of the political spectrum must reside on different platforms is concerning because it means we’re past the point of no return — the ‘us vs. them‘ mentality is a slippery slope, and we’re already on it.