EFF is the latest organization to leave X

The decline of X’s engagement and ability to drive traffic is the topic of the day, with several days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network.

Over the weekend, X’s head of product, Nikita Beer, and data analyst Nate Silver, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, disagreed over whether or not X was still able to send traffic to publishers. That was followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which noted that adding links to X posts is bad for engagement.

On Thursday, prominent digital rights group and non-profit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) announced it would also be leaving X after seeing revenues from its publications decline.

In a blog post, Kenyatta Thomas, the EFF’s social media director, said leaving

In 2018, EFF Twitter posts saw between 50 and 100 million monthly impressions, she said. By 2024, her 2,500 posts on the social media platform generated about 2 million monthly impressions. Last year, the EFF’s 1,500 posts received nearly 13 million impressions over the entire year.

“Honestly, X’s post today receives less than 3% of the views that a single tweet did seven years ago,” Thomas wrote.

The organization will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other places on the open social media network, noting that its presence on one of the platforms does not constitute an endorsement of these services.

“We stay because people on those platforms deserve access to information, too,” Thomas said. “We stay because some of our most-read posts are those that criticize the very platform we publish on.” “X is no longer where the battle takes place.” (Oh!)

EFF is one of many organizations to abandon

News organizations may have had different reasons for leaving X, but the traffic could have kept it in place. For some, like NPR and PBS, the departure was a reaction to Musk’s decision to incorrectly classify them as “state media,” a title typically reserved for mouthpieces of governments that lack editorial independence — such as propaganda networks in Russia and China. For others, like Le Monde, it was a reaction to Musk’s close ties to Trump.

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

Today, any traffic source is extremely valuable, as publishers grapple with shifts in online consumer behavior. The use of artificial intelligence is on the rise, driving traffic to publishers to a halt at the same time as news sites are seeing a decline in referrals from search engines and Facebook. This has left many newsrooms vulnerable to financial pressures or layoffs.

In Pierre’s debate with Silver, he accused newsrooms of using X incorrectly.

Pierre stressed that news outlets like the New York Times should publish in a way that encourages conversation on the X platform, not just use X as a news feed to post a simple headline and link. However, Silver noted that even when he worked to create discussion on the platform, it did not provide much lift in terms of traffic to his website.

“Conversion to off-site traffic is very average,” Silver wrote on X. “Maybe 2-3% of readers for a Silver newsletter article instead of about 1%.” By comparison, he noted that Twitter was sending FiveThirtyEight about 15% of its traffic.

Even some of Silver’s critics seemed to agree with his assessment of X, which he published in a newsletter. Specifically, X is now dominated by conservative influencers, and many of the top accounts have low-quality engagement. (For example, Silver noted that the account of Catward, a right-wing influencer known for spreading conspiracy theories, has more engagement than The New York Times.)

Naturally, Musk rejected this analysis, calling Silver’s data “nonsense” in his response.