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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallYes—available third-party data broadly supported the prediction that X would continue losing users and daily usage during 2025. But the evidence does not show that the November 2024 election alone caused the decline, nor does it prove that X was on the verge of disappearing.
The clearest interpretation is more complicated: X attracted exceptional election-week attention while some users deactivated or reduced their activity. During 2025, estimated daily usage remained below the prior year’s level, competitors gained visibility, and advertisers faced a more fragmented and politically distinct audience. At the same time, X remained influential in real-time political and news discussion and saw signs of stronger monetization in some areas.
The election produced a traffic spike—and an exodus at the same time
X became a major venue for election news and political discussion around November 5, 2024. Similarweb estimated that X received 46.5 million U.S. web visits on November 6, about 38% above its recent average and the highest level in the preceding year. The same analysis observed a sharp increase in account deactivations after the election.
Those figures are not contradictory. A major news event can bring people to a platform who would not otherwise visit, while existing users decide to leave. The traffic estimate measured web visits, not unique active users, and Similarweb could not measure equivalent deactivations from the mobile app. It therefore shows an attention surge and evidence of departures, not a complete count of everyone who left X.
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Similarweb’s analysis is best read as evidence of a short-term election effect—not proof that every post-election visitor became a lasting user or that every deactivation was politically motivated.
What the original forecast actually predicted
The forecast cited in the original coverage was narrower than the phrase “millions fled after the election” suggests. An eMarketer projection anticipated that X would lose 7 million U.S. monthly active users between Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition and the end of 2025.
That was a multi-year forecast, not a claim that seven million people left immediately after November 5, 2024. It was also an external estimate rather than an official X user count. X has not consistently published a directly comparable, independently verifiable series covering the same user definitions and periods.
The forecast attributed the expected decline to several overlapping pressures: dissatisfaction with the platform, political polarization, moderation concerns, and competition from services such as Bluesky. The election could accelerate those trends by making X’s political identity more visible, but it would be misleading to treat it as the sole cause.
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The original forecast and its context should therefore be understood as a prediction about a continuing audience shift, not an overnight collapse.
What the 2025 data showed
Later estimates broadly supported the direction of the prediction:
- January 2025: Sensor Tower estimates cited by TechCrunch put X’s U.S. and worldwide daily active users about 13% below the comparable year-earlier levels.
- Second quarter of 2025: X’s daily active users were reported to be down roughly 10% year over year.
- By July 2025: Similarweb data cited by TechCrunch indicated that Meta’s Threads was approaching X’s mobile daily-user level.
The figures do not represent a single official measurement. Sensor Tower and Similarweb use their own methodologies, panels, device coverage, and definitions. Still, declines reported across multiple periods are consistent with the central forecast: X entered 2025 with a smaller or changing active audience rather than returning to its pre-election trajectory.
Sources: TechCrunch’s January 2025 report and TechCrunch’s Q2 2025 report.
Why some users reconsidered X
Users’ reasons for leaving or reducing activity were varied. Potential factors included:
- Musk’s political activity and public support for Donald Trump.
- Perceptions that X’s moderation environment and enforcement standards had changed.
- Concerns about hate speech, misinformation, harassment, and political polarization.
- Changes to verification, algorithmic visibility, and platform rules.
- The November 2024 terms change concerning the use of posts for artificial-intelligence training, which some users viewed negatively.
- The availability of alternatives with different governance and moderation approaches.
These factors should not be treated as a universal explanation. Some people may have left because of spam, content quality, product changes, or personal preference. Others may have reduced posting while keeping an account for monitoring news. Many users may also have joined another service without abandoning X.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report described X’s U.S. audience as having shifted politically to the right after Musk’s takeover. It also highlighted challenges for news organizations dealing with lower engagement and a more hostile environment. That finding concerns audience composition, not the political views or motives of every individual user.
Which platforms benefited?
Bluesky
Bluesky became a prominent destination for users seeking a text-based network perceived as less closely associated with Musk and conservative politics. Sensor Tower data cited by TheWrap estimated that Bluesky averaged 2.83 million global daily users during the first week of February 2025, up 22% from the first week of December 2024.
That increase demonstrates demand for an alternative, but it does not prove permanent replacement. Some people may have used Bluesky alongside X, moved again, or stopped using it later. Bluesky also does not yet offer the same scale, discovery dynamics, or advertising maturity as the largest social platforms. Its official site is bsky.app.
Threads
Threads benefited from Meta’s Instagram integration and broader ecosystem. By mid-2025, Similarweb data cited by TechCrunch suggested Threads was nearing X’s mobile daily-user level. Meta also opened Threads advertising to global advertisers in April 2025 and announced tests of video ads the following month.
Threads may be an easier alternative for brands and creators already using Meta products, but it is not identical to X. The platforms differ in real-time news culture, discovery, political discussion, account relationships, and advertising systems. Its official site is threads.net.
Mastodon and the wider fediverse
Mastodon appeals to users who prioritize federation, decentralization, and server-level moderation. It is less direct a replacement for X when the goal is mass-market discovery, centralized analytics, or a single platform-wide advertising marketplace. Its official site is joinmastodon.org.
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The competitive pressure is broader than a contest among X, Bluesky, and Threads. The Reuters Institute reported that TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook remained important news sources in many markets. Reddit, private messaging, newsletters, and publisher-owned communities can also capture portions of the audience that once concentrated on X.
Why declining usage did not mean immediate collapse
A smaller audience can make a platform less valuable without making it irrelevant. X may retain a particularly active audience interested in politics, finance, technology, sports, breaking news, and live events. A platform with fewer users can still generate substantial attention if those users post frequently or include influential journalists, politicians, creators, and commentators.
There was also evidence that user volume and monetization were moving in opposite directions. Sensor Tower estimates cited by TechCrunch indicated that X’s mobile-app consumer spending rose 76.3% year over year in the relevant January comparison even as estimated daily users fell. This measure covers in-app purchases; it is not the same as advertising revenue, total revenue, or company valuation.
X could attempt to offset audience losses through subscriptions, higher revenue per paying user, new advertising formats, cost reductions, payments or financial products, and spending from advertisers less concerned about controversy. None of those possibilities proves that the business had solved its retention problem, but they explain why user decline alone cannot establish imminent failure.
What the audience shift means for advertisers and creators
Lower daily usage can reduce the supply of ad impressions, visit frequency, engagement opportunities, and the size of targetable audiences. A change in audience composition can matter just as much as the headline user count. Advertisers may reassess:
- Brand-safety exposure and the surrounding content environment.
- Audience diversity and the political concentration of users.
- Measurement quality and campaign reporting.
- Access to journalists, creators, publishers, and cultural commentators.
- Whether X remains effective for real-time event marketing.
X was not uniformly abandoned by advertisers. TechCrunch reported that Apple, Google, Verizon, and Dell were among brands advertising on X in 2025. Some advertisers may value X’s live-event reach, political and technology audiences, existing campaign infrastructure, or potentially lower auction prices. Others may prefer the broader reach and more established controls of larger advertising networks.
Advertisers comparing channels should use small, measurable tests rather than assume that a platform-wide audience trend predicts every campaign’s results. Relevant comparison options include X Ads, Meta advertising, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Reddit Ads, TikTok for Business, and YouTube advertising.
Creators and publishers face a related decision. Leaving X may reduce exposure to its remaining influential audience, while staying exclusively on X increases dependence on a platform with changing rules and uncertain reach. Maintaining a presence across multiple services, while directing followers toward an owned website, email list, or community, reduces that dependency.
How to interpret the numbers
“Users” can refer to materially different things:
- Monthly active users or daily active users.
- Web visitors or mobile-app users.
- Registered accounts or logged-in people.
- Monetizable daily active users.
- Estimated human users after attempts to exclude bots.
- U.S. users or global users.
- App downloads, which do not establish ongoing activity.
These measures should not be combined casually. A web-visit spike does not disprove an app-user decline. An increase in sign-ups on Bluesky does not prove that those people permanently left X. A rise in mobile consumer spending does not demonstrate higher advertising revenue. And a U.S. monthly-active-user forecast cannot be directly compared with a global daily-active-user estimate.
The most useful test for a durable exodus is sustained decline across multiple quarters, combined with reduced posting and engagement, loss of influential communities, migration to alternatives, advertiser response, and monetization per remaining user.
Was the “continuous ripple effect” prediction correct?
Directionally, yes. The post-election departure became part of a broader 2025 pattern of lower estimated daily usage and stronger competition, especially from Threads. The prediction was credible because it described an ongoing audience and business problem rather than claiming that X would instantly disappear.
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But the phrase should not be interpreted as a proven single-cause chain. The available evidence does not establish that the election alone caused X’s decline, that every departure was political, or that Bluesky and Threads captured all of the users who left. X’s audience may have become smaller, more politically concentrated, and more heavily oriented toward news and live events while the service remained commercially and culturally significant.
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