Twitter's Tumble

Since Musk's takeover, daily active app users are down by nearly a fourth.

Hey, all. Parker here.

According to a recent NBC News¹ report, Twitter has seen a massive 22.9% drop in the total number of daily U.S. app users since Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. To put that in perspective of the broader social media landscape, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat saw declines of 0.6%, 4.4%, 9.5%, and 1.7%, respectively.

In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.

Ouch!

Chart via Nigel Chiwaya/NBC News.

“The thing about declines like the one you’re seeing at X is that they’re irreversible,” wrote Platformer’s Casey Newton on Threads. “There is not one case of a social network rebounding after losing this many users in a year.”

“Twitter is, going by the percentage, losing users faster than MySpace did on its way down,” added Anil Dash.

“It’s been like a year, maybe more now, and you still have to call this place ‘X (formerly Twitter)’ in all articles about it or people won’t know what you are referring to,” tweeted writer Jesse Hawken.

Elon Musk photo by Steve Granitz/Getty Images.

In other bad news for the world’s least principled “free speech” advocate, Musk’s SLAPP lawsuit against the extremism watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate was thrown out on Monday. From Miles Klee’s report at Rolling Stone:

The decision marks an important legal defeat for Musk, who despite claiming to be a champion of “free speech” sought to muzzle the group for accurately reporting on X’s moderation struggles. It continued to share such data in the months after the suit was brought: In November, CCDH found that X failed to remove 98 percent of posts related to the Israel-Hamas conflict that broke the platform’s own rules about misinformation and hate speech.

In a February 29 hearing on CCDH’s motions, [Senior U.S. District Judge Charles] Breyer took a skeptical view of X’s argument, which rested on the premise that the organization had broken X’s rules by “scraping” information from the site and threatened user safety, at one point calling it “vapid.” Regarding the company’s financial losses, Breyer also noted that it was “significant” that X had chosen not to bring a defamation case to hold the CCDH liable. To prove defamation, X would have had to show that the CCDH’s reports were untrue.

In his decision, Judge Breyer wrote that there was “no mistaking” the purpose of Musk’s lawsuit, saying, “This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”