Regardless of whether you still call it Twitter or have accepted X into your life with open arms, it’s hard to miss the sheer volume of coverage the platform and its owner, Elon Musk, have been receiving recently.
It all started back in October 2022, when Musk put pen to paper on a deal worth around £34.5bn. Unsurprisingly, he seemed to want to stamp his authority on both the platform and wider company immediately. By November, he’d fired top executives, made half of the staff redundant, reworked the subscription service and created a ‘council’ to review account reinstatements. You know, light housekeeping.
It was arguably the reinstatements of previously banned accounts, such as Donald Trump and Andrew Tate, that caused the biggest stir, making many worry whether the platform was still a safe space. The question is, what impact have those decisions had on X?
What does the data say?
- Prior to Musk’s takeover, the then-Twitter enjoyed tens of millions of new users every year. Mashable highlights that since his takeover in 2022, growth has stagnated, with latest figures highlighting just a 1.6% increase year-on-year
- The value of X plummeted by 71% in the first 15 months after Musk purchased the platform, according to The Guardian
- This may be about to get worse, as X is at risk of losing 4% of its global annual turnover for allegedly training Grok on the data of 60m users in the EU without their consent
- While there are ongoing conversations on Threads about a Twitter X-odus, TechCrunch’s data deep-dive suggests no change in Threads’ user numbers and even, in some cases, slight growth for X
So it’s safe to say that it’s not been a resounding financial success over the past few years, and it seems that, while there may still be more than 500m users on X, things are only going to get worse. Musk’s apparent aim of turning X into a haven for unmoderated speech has caused brands to begin questioning if it’s the right place to spend their advertising budgets. His response? Legal action against them…
While he isn’t suing brands for deciding not to advertise on X, he has raised a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and the likes of Unilever and Mars for allegedly colluding to boycott the company to cause “massive economic harm”. This “harm” has seen the platform’s ad revenue half compared to prior years, caused by what Musk refers to as “activists.”
Days after the lawsuit was filed, it was revealed that GARM would be disbanded while pointing to the nonprofit’s limited financial resources. This isn’t the only impact Musk has had though. He’s actually managed to do the unthinkable; he’s found something every major newspaper in the UK agrees on.
For those people who get their news from the same paper, site or broadcaster every day, this might not seem that surprising. For a comms tech agency like us, scanning the news daily, we know that UK newspapers are rarely in agreement. Yet so far, it seems that, whether you’re reading traditionally left-leaning titles, like The Guardian, or the right-leaning press, such as The Daily Telegraph, they are all in agreement that brands should have the right to choose where their advertising dollars are spent.
Don’t believe me? These headlines run the gamut of the UK media’s traditional political spectrums, yet none are in favour of Elon’s latest legal action:
- The Guardian - Elon Musk is being ridiculous. Companies are free to choose where they advertise
- The Independent - Readers say ‘X is the disinformation company’ and call for Elon Musk boycott
- Daily Telegraph - How Musk dropped all pretence of civility to wage war on advertisers
Not an accolade that will have been on Musk’s bucket list I’m sure but something to be proud of nonetheless.
That’s the end of the first edition of ‘Your Weekly Antidote’. Come back next week for another dose of data-driven news analysis on one of the biggest stories of the week.
