Okay, I know that I'm going to trigger a bunch of Elon Musk fanboys who are going to hate me for this because if you share anything less than praise for Elon and X then you're against free speech, truth, and freedom in general, or whatever the case may be.

But in reality, Elon and Co., by design or otherwise, continue to circulate false stories about how X is doing relativistically, which, if one looks at the trends, continues to lose ground further in the larger social media ecosystem.

Last week, Elon again tweeted out false information claiming X outpaces Meta's apps in usage, and that X is "the number one news app."

That’s not to say that these claims are entirely untrue, but the framing of them is disingenuous, at best.
This is based on the data of SimilarWeb, a web traffic measurement platform, that provides insight into how different sites perform. And here lies the creative license, in that these figures are measuring web traffic only, so this is only a measure of visits to x.com on a web browser. These figures do not include app usage.

Why is that relevant?  Because, according to X's own self-reported user statistics, the data implies about 88.55% of X users enter the app on a mobile device.
Therefore, of X's 250 million reported daily active users, a mere 29 million of them log in through the site. Thus, this usage graph captures only the usage of a percentage of X's user base. Compared to usage in general, X is far from the levels of Facebook or IG.

To put that in perspective, Facebook has more than 2 billion people who access it daily, with the vast majority of those accessing it only through mobile and even higher percentage of IG users at nearly 1 billion DAU and only have access to the platform via mobile. Facebooks' raw number amounts to eight times the daily user count of X, while IG's number stands four times X's DAU amount.

This, of course, is measuring only a fraction of each app's usage. So, while the X website may have logged more users than Instagram.com, this only compares, essentially, 12% of X's users against around 5% of IGs.

Which is not really indicative of anything.

Still, it's something, right? The fact that X sees more desktop users log in than those of Facebook and IG is still substantial, knowing that last October, SimilarWeb reported that X had lost 14% on mobile and web visits since September 2022.
One of the ways that x.com has seen a rise in traffic is due to the switchover from twitter.com. That must have helped its traffic significantly. But to double its traffic between May and June?

More to the point, however, regardless of whether X is overtaking Facebook or Instagram in total usage, the framing of the claims themselves is suspect. Which brings up questions about all the data X is talking about.
Ah, yes, X is actually ruling the roost in terms of App Store charts in the "News" app, but this is simply because it's not really a "News" app by any definition of the word, and when you consider who it competes with for that category, it's not really all that surprising that a social media network is going to win the race.

But why is X listed as a "News" app?
For this reason alone, back in 2016, when the growth of the app had been slowing for several quarters (though Facebook and Instagram were booming), the management of Twitter were certainly coming under increasing pressure to turn things around in order to capitalize on the perceived opportunity. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey finally came up with a brilliant plan to change its growth story: What if Twitter changed its categorization to the "News" category in the App Store instead, shoving itself out of the "Social Media" segment in which it was never going to win?

It's worth noting that Twitter does indeed have a lot of news content, and a lot of news publishers posting to it. It's kind of a news app. Right?
After being added in the "News" category in the Apple App Store it has remained the number one "News" app for eight years since then and there hasn't been any recent change in that. X is not trending on the charts of News because it is leading its category-it is not a news application; it's social media. In fact, it cannot even be placed under the category of "News" in Google Play, as it is based on content created by users.
 
Which means, no, it's not a "News" application.
Know that Twitter/X is always the top News app. For it's not a news app and shouldn't be measured with smaller apps having but a fraction of its usage.

Which again, raises several questions on how Elon measures his metrics and what data he touts to 200 million followers. For it's misleading and portrays a wrong interpretation about the success of the app.

Here's the reality check: X hasn't grown its DAU - or daily active users - since November 2022, when it first reported reaching 250 million DAU. This is 20 months of no usage growth. X says that MAU have grown - up 10% from 500 million monthly users in March last year to 570 million today. So it is, apparently, seeing some increased interest, but adding 70 million new monthly users in 17 months is also not indicative of significant rising interest.
But then again, X has also claimed to have tackled bots, which would have seen it cull millions of profiles as well, and maybe, in doing so, there has been higher growth than the raw figures would suggest.

That's why Elon wanted to emphasize "daily user seconds" instead as the other key metric for engagement and activity.

In that respect, X said last week that in Q2 it served an average 361.9 billion daily user seconds, or 24 minutes per day per user in the app. Which is down from the 30 minutes per user per day that X reported in March.

This aside, though, reports have also reflected that X's revenues are down by nearly 50% for 2023 at this point in the year.

So on balance, X is not going great. Which can be great for Elon and Co., as they might view that as the price of "upholding free speech," or whatever it is they think is happening. But the point here is that Elon keeps peddling false stats about the performance of the platform, which, when looked at on a deeper analysis, doesn't quite live up to the promises they claim.

Well, people will see what they want to see anyway, I suppose, but in any case, such claims are not entirely accurate summations of X's current status.