The buzz phrase for the post-election exodus of users from X has focused on a "mass exodus." Reportedly, people have been deactivating their X accounts in record numbers.

But is that true? Is X really losing millions of users every day and thus heading down a fast lane to irrelevance?

Well, maybe. The truth is nobody knows except for those people working for X, and they are probably not going to blow the whistle if it's bad news about the app. And they don't need to because of X no longer being a publicly traded company, as Twitter was; so it has no obligations to disclose anything about its results to the general public at any rate.

And, besides that, there are some external markers that X is losing audiences, but these aren't definitive, and you'd be taking a pretty big leap to assume that they mean that X is on the way out.

Because it's probably not, at least not yet.

One of the most quoted reports on X usage has been this one from Similarweb, showing how more than 115,000 U.S. web visitors deactivated their X accounts on Election Day.
That's not a surprise because political divisions in the United States have intensified fears and thus have driven more people away from Elon Musk's project for social media. But the data presented here is very incomplete, as Similarweb only captures one dimension of website traffic, which, in this particular case, happens to be visitation to the account cancelation page on x.com. Similarweb does not have any data regarding activity within the X application, and as more than 88% of X usage occurs within the mobile application, then any assumption based on this teeny proportion of its general usage would be just an assumption.

That might well point to something greater, but we do not know because it is only a minor element of X's general usage.

Other signs include a sudden spate of users on Bluesky over the last week, as well as more academics-more with quite high followings-unlocking their X accounts. Then there are anecdotal signs. There are piles of users on Threads and Bluesky announcing that they've deleted their X accounts.

So it does seem to be somewhat of a reversal off of Musk's X project. But to say that there is a dramatic change again presumes the reasonable.

Because at the same time, X itself continues to trumpet record high use, and there are also hints that more people, and advertisers, are reconsidering the platform in the wake of Trump's victory. There's something to be said for the fact that the poll numbers reflected a lot of what X's hive mind has been saying, which could indicate more people are actually in alignment with Musk and X than many analysts had expected.

So X might be in a better position than many reports suggest, but again, we don't know because X staff are the only ones with access to the real data and tell us they're good.
No I'm not saying that we should believe the staff at X either as they've continuously presented over- and selected data in the past. But again, the bottom line is we don't know, though given that X saw such a surge in usage during the election, that suggests that the platform is still playing a pretty significant role in disseminating information in real time, And there really isn't a replacement for that yet.

According to Pew Research, the same is true, that there is indeed another, more recent shift away from X but nothing near as dramatic as you might think.
This was during the poll before the election, but even so, you can feel that the anticipated shift away from X has not been seismic.
What we do know, from X's own data, is that X is losing users in Europe, as its logged in user numbers fell by about a million people over the course of 2024. Its logged out guest numbers fell far more, and if you viewed this as an indicative trend, then we can assume once again that X is losing attention everywhere.

Though not in a gigantic way. And once more, only X can really tell us, and it hasn't provided an official update on its active user counts since March when it reported 250 million daily actives, and June when it claimed 570 million monthly users.

X hasn't added to its daily active user count for two years, so it's clearly not seeing a major upswing either, though its monthly active user count has increased by 70 million over the last year. Given that X also imposed limits on what logged-out users can see, that makes sense but doesn't suggest any major growth or interest.

But it does not indicate otherwise, and I would argue that although many people are spending less time in the app, many people are still checking in on X, because it continues to be the best app for breaking news updates for many sectors and communities.

Not to say we didn't have insight before, just based on quarterly updates from Twitter, but also from researchers who used the Twitter API. That enabled us to track account deactivations at scale, amongst other things. Elon and Co. have priced most of these folk out of the market, in order to keep X posts away from AI developers, presumably.

But in balance, I can tell you that X isn't dying at least not yet. And while Elon Musk has President-Election Donald Trump's ear, I would expect it will stay relevant for a while longer.

You may not like that fact, but the truth of the matter is that X is still adding value to hundreds of millions of people.