X’s decline in engagement and its ability to drive traffic has been a hot topic, following several days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network.
Over the weekend, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, and data analyst Nate Silver, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, feuded over X’s ability to send traffic to publishers. This was followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which suggested that links in X posts reduce engagement.
On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced its departure from X due to declining returns from its posts.
After nearly 20 years on the platform, EFF is logging off X. In a blog post, EFF’s social media manager Kenyatta Thomas noted the move wasn’t a light decision but was overdue.
Thomas highlighted that EFF’s posts received between 50 and 100 million impressions per month in 2018. By 2024, its 2,500 posts generated around 2 million impressions monthly. Last year, its 1,500 posts garnered about 13 million impressions annually.
“An X post today receives less than 3% of the views a tweet delivered seven years ago,” Thomas wrote.
The organization will continue posting on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, emphasizing that presence on a platform does not equate to endorsement.
“We stay because people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. X is no longer where the fight is happening,” Thomas noted.
EFF joins many organizations leaving X, including NPR, PBS, The Guardian, Le Monde, and others, as well as numerous academics and celebrities.
These organizations might have stayed if X maintained its traffic-driving capabilities. For NPR and PBS, the departure resulted from Musk’s decision to falsely label them as “state-affiliated media.” In contrast, for Le Monde, it was tied to Musk’s connections with Trump.
Today, any traffic source is valuable as publishers face shifts in online behavior, with AI impacting publisher traffic and decreasing referrals from search engines and Facebook. Newsrooms face financial pressure, leading to closures or layoffs.
In a debate with Bier, Silver accused newsrooms of misusing X. Bier suggested news outlets should foster conversation on X rather than merely posting headlines and links. Silver, however, noted that even fostering on-platform discussion didn’t significantly increase website traffic.
“Conversion to off-site traffic is middling,” Silver wrote on X, clarifying that Twitter used to provide FiveThirtyEight with around 15% of its traffic.
Even some of Silver’s critics agreed with his assessment, which he shared in a newsletter. X is led by conservative influencers, with top accounts in engagement often being low quality. Musk dismissed Silver’s findings as “bullshit.”
NiemanLab’s analysis of 18 large publishers’ recent posts supported Silver’s claims, indicating that posts with links saw poor engagement.
This doesn’t necessarily imply X is downranking their posts — the company claims it stopped doing that — it could mean X isn’t as lively as before.