When Elon Musk took over the microblogging platform Twitter, The users and celebrities were threatening to deactivate their accounts, expressing their displeasure with the new administration.
Of course, we often hear this from time to time, but then, many realize that it is easier said than done, and continue to use the platform.
That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, as many people have deactivated their accounts since Musk took over, it reports MIT Technology Review.
According to new data from Bot Sentinel, a company that monitors bots on Twitter, the network already had 877.000 account deactivations from October 27th to November 1st. In the same time frame, 497.000 were suspended accounts.
To arrive at this number, Bot Sentinel looked at the percentage of users who had their accounts deactivated or suspended after Musk's acquisition. They then applied that percentage to Twitter's total user base, which today stands at 237 million.
Deactivation is when a user intentionally closes their account. Suspension, on the other hand, is when Twitter closes an account due to inactivity, inauthenticity, or violation of the site's rules.
A separate analysis by the Network Contagion Research Institute found that malicious users are trying to test Twitter's limits after Musk acquired it. For example, the use of “nigger” on the platform increased by almost 500% in just 12 hours since Musk announced he was taking over Twitter.
Ο Christopher Bouzy, founder of Bot Sentinel, predicts that the increasingly hostile environment on Twitter will eventually cause user attrition.
“I think if users continue to deactivate their accounts en masse, that too will be a major problem for the platform. If the left and the marginalized leave the platform, Twitter will be no different than Parler or Truth Social ".
