X’s decline in engagement and its 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’s head of product, Nikita Bier, and data analyst Nate Silver, previously of FiveThirtyEight, feuded over whether or not X was still capable of sending traffic to publishers. This was followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which suggested that adding links to X posts is bad for engagement.

On Thursday, the prominent digital rights group and nonprofit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) announced it, too, was leaving X after seeing decreasing returns from its posts.

In a blog post, EFF’s social media manager, Kenyatta Thomas, said that leaving X after almost 20 years on the platform wasn’t “a decision we made lightly,” but explained that the math no longer works out in its favor.

In 2018, EFF’s posts to Twitter saw between 50 and 100 million impressions per month, she said. By 2024, its 2,500 posts on the social platform generated around 2 million impressions per month. Last year, EFF’s 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,” 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 is not an endorsement of these services.

“We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we’re posting on,” Thomas said. “X is no longer where the fight is happening.” (Ouch!)

EFF is one of many organizations to ditch X, following other high-profile exits that have included various news publishers like NPR, PBS, The Guardian, Le Monde, and others, as well as many academics, celebs, local governments, and more.

The news organizations may have had various reasons to leave X, but traffic could have kept them around. For some, like NPR and PBS, the departure was a reaction to Musk’s decision to falsely label them as “state-affiliated media,” a title typically reserved for mouthpieces of governments 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 with Trump.

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

Today, any source of traffic is highly valuable, as publishers deal with shifts in online consumer behavior. AI usage is ramping up, killing traffic to publishers at the same time that news sites are seeing declining referrals from search engines and Facebook. That’s left many newsrooms to fold under the financial pressure or conduct layoffs.

In Bier’s debate with Silver, he accused newsrooms of using X wrong.

Bier stressed that news outlets like The New York Times should be posting in a way to encourage conversation on X’s platform, not just using X as a news feed to publish a simple headline and a link. Silver, however, pointed out that even when he did the work to generate on-platform discussion, it didn’t provide much of a lift in terms of traffic to his website.

“The conversion to off-site traffic is very middling,” Silver wrote on X. “Maybe 2-3% of the readership for a Silver Bulletin article instead of ~1%.” By comparison, he noted that Twitter used to send FiveThirtyEight around 15% of its traffic.

Even some of Silver’s detractors seemed to agree with his assessment of X, which he published in a newsletter. Namely, X is now dominated by conservative influencers, and many top accounts in terms of engagement are low quality. (For instance, Silver pointed out that the account “Catturd,” a right-wing influencer known for spreading conspiracy theories, sees more engagement than The New York Times.)

Musk, of course, dismissed this analysis, calling Silver’s data “bullshit” in a reply.

NiemanLab’s own analysis involving 18 large publishers’ most recent 200 posts generally supported Silver’s claims. It found that newsrooms publishing links alongside X posts were seeing poor engagement — including on future posts.

That doesn’t necessarily mean X is downranking their posts — the company claims it stopped doing that — it could just mean that X is not as happening as it was before.

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