Communications of the ACM
Twitter May Have Lost More than a Million Users Since Musk Took Over
Bot Sentinel's Christopher Bouzy believes the uptick in the number of account suspensions is in part due to hate speech from a proportion of the user base testing what they can and can’t say on the site now that it is under Musk’s control.
Credit: Noah Berger/AP
In the days after Elon Musk's October 27 purchase of Twitter was confirmed by his tweet saying "the bird is freed," many Twitter users have threatened to leave, unhappy about the new ownership.
People always threaten to leave Twitter and then often fail to follow through—but new data suggests that a significant number of users really are abandoning the platform this time.
The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That's more than double the usual number.
"We have observed an uptick in people deactivating their accounts and also Twitter suspending accounts," says Christopher Bouzy, Bot Sentinel's founder.
From MIT Technology Review
View Full Article
No entries found