X/Twitter’s Death Spiral Continues as EFF Leaves the Platform

Even well known organizations are struggling to justify their presence on X/Twitter. EFF said that they are gone.

One of the main reasons to use a social media platform as a business is to reach new potential customers and viewers. It’s a big reason why websites like ours established a presence on several platforms. In the case of X/Twitter, however, things got complicated when Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Ever since that moment, Musk delivered a master class on how to ruin a once popular platform by, among other things, turning the platform into a far right conspiracy theory driven disinformation hate machine. While Twitter wasn’t exactly perfect, it was far better before the Musk takeover. In the wake of all the chaos and destruction Musk unleashed onto his own platform, open platforms like Mastodon saw surges in traffic as people migrated to alternatives. Bluesky also saw a huge bulk of new users as a result of the ransacking.

One of the pivotal moves Musk made was to kill third party API access, one of the key components of making the platform an overwhelming success. One of the uses of third party API access is to allow for people like us to automatically share links to our site on the platform. That move ultimately killed our ability to do so.

This led to a big decision for Freezenet. Do I look for another plugin to share links on the platform or do I ditch the platform altogether? A big factor in all of this is how little reward I got for all of my efforts over the years of being on the platform. Despite writing such high quality content that puts numerous mainstream media outlets to shame and actively participating on the platform itself, Freezenet barely got a trickle of traffic from the platform in general. This ultimately helped to drive the decision for us to ditch X/Twitter back in 2023. Another reason is, of course, the fact that we didn’t want to continue to reward Musk for being a complete idiot in the process.

While our decision was a pretty easy one as we continue to enjoy our time on Mastodon and, increasingly, Bluesky, what about organizations who were able to utilize their high profile status to help drive traffic to their own site and benefit the platform in the process? Well, as it turns out, even they are struggling to make X/Twitter work.

Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced that they are ditching the platform as well. The reason? The match just isn’t working out any more. From the EFF:

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.

The Numbers Aren’t Working Out

We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

The position is very understandable here. While some might wonder why it took so long for the EFF to make the decision, if you are actually reaching high volumes of people on the platform, it makes it a much harder thing to contemplate leaving. Why stop doing what is actually working?

Obviously, there will be die hard users on the platform that intend on sticking to the platform for as long as humanly possible. They know what is familiar to them and they want to stick with what is familiar. The problem is that the toxicity of the platform is just continuing to reign supreme and, eventually, people will start to finally have enough of the hate machine that really defines the platform. This, in turn, gradually drives users of increasing dedication to the platform away.

So, really, it’s not surprising that user engagement is drying up for even the large organizations. By trying to promote yourself on the platform, you are increasingly just soliciting the attention of the worst scum the human race has to offer. Regular people are increasingly being driven away, leaving the racist hate mongerers and scammers to fill the void. Eventually, those organizations are going to look at the numbers and realize that it’s just not worth the effort solely from a business perspective.

That is obviously what happened here. The numbers aren’t adding up to making this a viable platform to promote their content. As a result, they made a similar decision to Freezenet and chose to just stop sharing content on the platform.

The knock-on effect, of course, is that as there is less content on the platform, there will be fewer reasons to be on that platform in the first place. It’s a self-feeding cycle of less content, fewer people engaging, and organizations having fewer reasons for being on the platform in the first place.

While some people would have hoped that this collapse would be happening at a much quicker rate, I think experts rightfully pointed out that collapsing an overwhelmingly successful platform was going to take a very long time. Momentum is a thing, so even if you sabotage pretty much everything about your own platform, there’s going to be people continuing to be on the platform anyway because that’s where people really are going to be. That is increasingly being less and less true, however, and as the years progress, the breakdown is simply going to continue. It just takes time is all.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.