Ever since Elon Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter, this time last year, plenty of decisions ranging from head-scratching to plain bad have been made. Now, one year later, there is clear data indicating that those decisions have done next to nothing except destroy the once massive and respected platform’s user base.
On the eve of Elon Musk’s one-year anniversary as owner of Twitter (now X) Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published a report citing data from analytics firm Sensor Tower showing how much the platform flopped under the billionaire’s tutelage. Most notably, data reveals that in the year since October 2022, daily active mobile users on X fell approximately 15%. Its competitors such as YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook all saw growth, in contrast. Similarly, there was an average of 183 million daily active mobile users on X in September 2023, which fell behind Snapchat’s 385 million, while YouTube topped the list with 2 billion.
Twitter did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment on the report.
Musk officially took over the Twitter/X platform this time last year, and it’s been downhill ever since. The Tesla CEO made a bizarre series of choices to upend much of the digital infrastructure the platform built over the last decade and a half. This past April, court filings revealed that Musk was rebranding the company name from Twitter Inc. to X Corp. The platform itself eventually became known as X after the URL twitter.com began redirecting to X.com this past summer.
In recent months, Musk allowed users to restrict replies to only those with blue checkmarks and disabled the mechanism allowing users to report inaccurate content. The billionaire also appointed former NBC ad executive Linda Yaccarino as company CEO, who has been forced to clean up the mess left behind by Musk’s bid to create a website for everything.