The digital rights protection organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has just announced its departure from the X social network platform, marking another prominent case in the wave of withdrawals from the social network owned by Elon Musk.
In an official blog post, Kenyatta Thomas - EFF's social media manager, said that the decision to leave X after nearly 20 years of presence was not easy at all.
However, according to her, economic factors and access efficiency are no longer sufficient for the organization to continue operating on this platform.
Data released by the EFF shows a significant decline. In 2018, the organization's posts reached 50 to 100 million views per month.
By 2024, about 2,500 posts per month will only bring about 2 million views. Last year, a total of 1,500 EFF posts only reached about 13 million views in the whole year.
Currently, a post receives less than 3% of views compared to a tweet seven years ago," Thomas said, while emphasizing the serious decline in accessibility.
EFF said it will continue to operate on other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
This organization also affirmed that maintaining a presence on social networks does not mean supporting those platforms, but to ensure that information still reaches the public.
Not only EFF, many large organizations have left X in the past, including news agencies such as NPR, PBS, The Guardian and Le Monde, along with many scholars, local authorities and celebrities.
Reasons for withdrawal vary, from opposing Elon Musk's controversial decisions to concerns about the information environment and media effectiveness.
In this context, the question of X's ability to lead traffic is becoming a topic of debate. X's product division head - Nikita Bier, said that publishers have not properly utilized the platform, especially when only posting headlines with links instead of creating discussions.
However, analyst Nate Silver refutes this view, saying that even when trying to create interaction, the conversion rate to external traffic is still very low, only about 2–3%. This figure is much lower than the level of about 15% that Twitter once brought to FiveThirtyEight before.
A report from NiemanLab also reinforces this view. Analysis of 200 posts from 18 major publishers shows that posts with linked inserts often have poorer interaction, even negatively affecting posts afterwards.
Although X denies intentionally reducing the display of linked articles, many experts believe that this platform is gradually losing its appeal.
The change in user behavior, along with the rise of artificial intelligence and the decline in traffic from search engines and Facebook, is putting publishers under great financial pressure.
In that context, the EFF's decision is not only an isolated move, but also reflects a profound change in the way organizations evaluate the effectiveness of social networks, which once was an important traffic source, but is now gradually losing its central role.
