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As we've already seen from the number of its monthly active users, Twitter (X) seems to be doing just fine. However, there was a time when people and businesses chose to boycott the platform. At the end of 2023, a year after Elon Musk took over the platform, some big brands like Apple, Disney, and IBM stopped running ads on it. Unfortunately, their boycott didn't last long: in November 2024, all three giants returned to X with their ads.
Unilever, despite previously being part of an advertisement boycott lawsuit against the platform, reached a settlement with X and is advertising its products on there again. Why were the brands worried? Some advertisers have expressed concern that their ads would appear next to harmful content. As research firm Kantar explained, "X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next — it's difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment."
Just last month, the platform was hit with a change in leadership. Its CEO of two years, Linda Yaccarino, resigned on July 9. While she didn't give an official reason, many experts speculate that she was set up to fail from the get-go.
"Faced with a mercurial owner who never fully stepped away from the helm and continued to use the platform as his personal megaphone, Yaccarino had to try to run the business while also regularly putting out fires," Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg told PBS.
Yaccarino's main goal was to fix X's ad business, but, as Business Insider explains it, it's an impossible task. X is not a big enough platform for some advertisers to see as a must, and Musk being the owner generates too many potential headaches for reputation-conscious brands.
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It's not just brands and advertisers who are leaving X. Euronews reported that around 115,000 users deactivated their accounts a day after Donald Trump's re-election. Almost two months later, The Guardian wrote that X has lost about 2.7 million active – both Apple and Android US – users.
Experts have been referring to this as the "Twitter (X) exodus," since netizens are leaving for another platform – Bluesky. In the last months of 2024, their numbers rose from 254,500 to almost 2.7 million. On November 13, The Guardian announced they would stop posting on X. "X is a toxic media platform and (...) its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse," they wrote.
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Bluesky currently has almost 38 million total users, and it seems to be the promised land for Twitter refugees, at least for the moment. Musk called his platform the "digital town square", but, as Bruce Daisley, a former vice-president of Twitter (X) in Europe, explains, it has simply become a less enjoyable place to be. "If I went out to a Christmas market, and if in the corner of this Christmas market there was a group of racist protesters, I probably wouldn't stay there," he added.
Senior contributor for Forbes Paul Tassi writes that one of the main attraction points of Bluesky is... well, less harassment. On Twitter (X), even if you block a person, they can still see your posts, they just can't interact with them. However, they're still allowed to screenshot them and comment under the posts of your followers. "This is again being positioned as some sort of 'freedom of speech' thing," Tassi adds.
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On Bluesky, according to Tassi, it's much easier to get more interactions even if you have a moderate amount of followers. That's because Bluesky doesn't have a 'punishing algorithm' that hides posts with links (X is link-averse because they don't want anything to link away from their site) and currently has a more engaged community that frequents the site.
