During today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on children’s online safety, X CEO Linda Yaccarino downplayed the social network’s reach among younger users when she noted that less than 1% of the app’s US users were adolescents aged 13 to 17 years. number in the box, also disclosing that there were 90 million X users in the US — a drop from the reported 95.4 million estimated users from January 2023, according to Statista data.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, which has since been renamed X, the US was theirs bigger market, ahead of Japan, India, Brazil and others. Speaking at an event last fall, Musk claimed the network had grown to a total of 550 million monthly active users, though it was unclear if his calculations included fake accounts such as bots and spammers.
While Musk didn’t break down X usage by market at the time, Yaccarino last month reported that X’s overall user base was growing. noting that as of December 7, 2023, more than 10 million people had already signed up for X during the month.
However, its figures shared with the US Senate today suggest that X may face a slight year-on-year decline in the US, assuming market estimates for 2023 were accurate. (Statista noted that they were based on addressable ad audiences and served by DataReportal.) A decline will align with market expectations, as a Pew Research study published in July 2023 found that a quarter of Twitter users said they were unlikely to be on the site in a year. Although Twitter, now X, has remained stickier than we first thought, it has faced several new competitors, such as the Mastodon decentralized network, Bluesky, and Instagram Threads, among others. Third-party data also showed X usage had declined in Musk’s first year of ownership, Axios said in October.
Although X has come under fire for not taking appropriate steps to block CSAM (child sexual abuse material) on its platform in markets such as the EU and Australia, it has sued by CSAM victims and last year he unblocked the account of a user who had posted CSAM images, the company largely dodged deeper questions about its plans to combat CSAM during today’s hearing. Lawmakers also didn’t address Taylor Swift’s recent porn debacle in depth, even though the the news had reached the White House.
In addition to downplaying X’s reach among young people, Yaccarino also distanced the company from its predecessor, Twitter, calling X “a 14-month-old company” that “has re-prioritized child protection and safety measures.” He added that X “just started talking and discussing how we can improve them [measures] with parental control”.
Timed to coincide with the hearing, the company shared that suspended 12.4 million user accounts for violating CSE (child sexual exploitation) policies in 2023, up from 2.3 million accounts removed from Twitter in 2022. Also sent 850,000 reports to NCMEC (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children), eight times more than before Musk’s acquisition.
This evidence, of course, can be viewed in different ways — either that X has increased enforcement, as people want to believe, or that CSAM-related activity itself has increased in X, followed by an increase in the number of reports .
Also during the hearing, Yaccarino responded to a question about how many content moderators were on staff by saying X had 2,300 people “around the world.” This is more than the number of X employees. (After acquiring Musk, 80% of its 7,500 workforce was fired or resigned, including most of the trust and security team.) X recently said it planned to bolster its trust and security teams by hiring 100 full-time supervisors in Austin, Texas.
In an emailed response, an X representative said it has 2,300 people, as Yaccarino said, but it’s a mix of full-time employees and full-time contractors.
