X’s declining engagement and ability to drive traffic has been a hot topic these days, and it’s been a few days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network.
Over the weekend, X’s head of product Nikita Bier and Nate Silver, formerly a data analyst at FiveThirtyEight, argued over whether X could still send traffic to publishers. On Wednesday, NiemanLab released a report showing that adding links to X posts is bad for engagement.
On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a prominent digital rights group and non-profit, also announced it was leaving X after seeing declining revenue from posts.
In a blog post, Kenyatta Thomas, EFF’s social media manager, explained that while leaving
In 2018, EFF’s Twitter posts received between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, 2,500 posts on social platforms would generate approximately 2 million impressions per month. Last year, EFF’s 1,500 posts received about 13 million impressions over the course of the year.
“To put it bluntly, post X today gets less than 3% of the views that a single tweet delivered seven years ago,” Thomas wrote.
The organization will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and elsewhere on the public social web, noting that presence on the platforms does not constitute an endorsement of these services.
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“We’re staying because people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We’re staying because some of our most read posts are posts that criticize the very platforms we post on,” Thomas said. “X is no longer where the fighting is taking place.” (ouch!)
EFF is one of many organizations to drop the
There may have been many reasons for media outlets to leave X, but traffic congestion may have caused them to stay. For some, like NPR and PBS, these departures were a response to Musk’s decision to misclassify them as “national media.” This is a title typically reserved for government mouthpieces that lack editorial independence, such as propaganda networks based in Russia and China. For others, such as Le Monde, it was a response to Musk’s close relationship with Trump.
But it’s easier to take a stand when you have little to lose.
Every traffic source is critical as publishers today deal with changes in online consumer behavior. As the use of AI surges, traffic to publishers is decreasing, while news sites are seeing a decline in referrals from search engines and Facebook. This has led to many newsrooms closing or being laid off due to financial pressures.
In his argument with Silver, Bier accused the newsroom of misusing X.
Bier emphasized that news outlets like the New York Times should publish in a way that encourages conversation on X’s platform, rather than using X as a news feed to simply post headlines and links. However, Silver noted that even when he did the work to generate discussions within the platform, it did not provide a significant boost in terms of traffic to his website.
Silver wrote to By comparison, he noted that Twitter sent about 15% of its traffic to FiveThirtyEight.
Even some of Silver’s detractors seemed to agree with his assessment of X in his newsletter. That means X is now dominated by conservative influencers, and many of its top accounts are low quality in terms of engagement. (For example, Silver pointed out that the “Catturd” account, a right-wing influencer account known for spreading conspiracy theories, sees more engagement than The New York Times.)
Of course, Musk dismissed this analysis in his response, calling Silver’s data “bullshit.”
NiemanLab’s own analysis, which included 200 recent posts from 18 large publishers, generally supported Silver’s claims. Newsrooms that post links with X number of posts see lower engagement, including on future posts.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that X will lower the ranking of your post. The company claims it has stopped doing this. It might just mean that X doesn’t happen as it did before.
