The EFF is the latest organization to leave X

X’s declining engagement and ability to drive traffic is the topic du jour, with several days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network.

Over the weekend, X chief product officer Nikita Bier and data analyst Nate Silver, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, got into an argument if X was still able to send traffic to publishers. Followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which suggested that linking to X posts is bad for engagement.

On Thursday, the prominent digital rights group and nonprofit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) was announced He was also exiting X after seeing diminishing returns from his positions.

In a blog post, EFF social media manager Kenyatta Thomas said leaving X after nearly 20 years on the platform was “not a decision we took lightly,” but explained that the math was no longer working in its favor.

In 2018, the EFF’s Twitter posts were getting between 50 and 100 million impressions per month, he said. By 2024, his 2,500 posts on the social platform generated about 2 million impressions per month. Last year, the EFF’s 1,500 posts earned about 13 million impressions for the entire year.

“To put it bluntly, an X post today gets less than 3% of the views of a single tweet seven years ago,” Thomas wrote.

The organization will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and elsewhere on the open social web, noting that its presence on a platform does not constitute an endorsement of those services.

“We stay because the people on these platforms also deserve access to information. We stay because some of our most read posts are the ones that criticize the very platform we post on,” Thomas said. “X is no longer where the fight is.” (Ouch!)

The EFF is one of many organizations to lose X, following other high-profile exits that have included various news publishers such as NPR, PBS, The Guardian, Le Mondeand othersas well as many academics, celebrities, local governmentsand more.

News organizations may have had various reasons for abandoning X, but the move could have kept them around. For some, like NPR and PBS, the withdrawal was a reaction to Musk’s decision to falsely label them as “state media,” a title. usually kept for government mouthpieces that lack editorial independence — such as Russia- and China-based propaganda networks. For others, like Le Monde, it was a reaction to Musk’s close ties to Trump.

But it’s easier to take a stand when you have nothing to lose.

Today, any source of traffic is valuable as publishers face changes in consumer behavior online. The use of artificial intelligence is on the rise, killing traffic to publishers at the same time that news sites are seeing a decline in referrals from search engines and Facebook. This left many newsrooms folding under financial pressure or making layoffs.

In Bier’s discussion with Silver, he accused news agencies of misusing X.

Hearse he emphasized that news outlets like the New York Times should post in a way that encourages conversation on X’s platform, not just use X as a news feed to post a simple headline and link. Silver, however, pointed out that even when he did the work to generate conversation on the platform, it didn’t provide much of a lift in terms of traffic to his website.

“Conversion to off-site traffic is very average,” Silver he wrote at X. “Maybe 2-3% of the readership for a Silver Bulletin article instead of ~1%.” By comparison, he noted that Twitter was sending FiveThirtyEight about 15 percent of its traffic.

Even some of Silver’s critics seemed to do so agree with his estimate of X, which himself published in a newsletter. In particular, X is now dominated by conservative influencers and many top accounts in terms of engagement are of low quality. (For example, Silver pointed out that the account “Catturd,” a right-wing influencer known for spreading conspiracy theoriessees more engagement than the New York Times.)

Musk, of course, rejected that analysis, calling Silver’s data “bullshit” in an answer.