Bot Sentinel, a data and information tracking firm, has uncovered a significant reduction in the number of users of Twitter since the social media giant company was acquired by the world richest man, Elon musk, after he sealed a $44billion deal with the blue bird previous owners.
Bot Sentinel tracks inauthentic Twitter behavior by analyzing over 3.1 million accounts and their daily activity. The data firm reported that Twitter may have lost over a million users in two weeks. It also reported that some users have been suspended by the company and others may have deactivated their account out of protest.
According to the report, approximately 877,000 accounts were deactivated and another 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. “That is more than double the usual number”, the Daily mail stated.
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“Twitter currently has around 237 million ‘monetizable daily active users” Bot sentinel stated, adding that around 0.59 percent of the users they monitor had suspended or deactivated their account, which indicated a 208 percent increase in account losses compared to the days before Musk purchased the company.
Christopher Bouzy, founder of Bot Sentinel proposed that the upsurge in people deactivating their accounts and also Twitter suspending users’ accounts could be due to many users’ disagreement with the new Twitter boss and an attempt to test what hate speech is now permissible under the platform’s new leadership. According to him:
”We believe the uptick in deactivations is a result of people upset with Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and deciding to deactivate their accounts in protest.
”We also believe the increase in suspensions is from Twitter taking action on accounts purposely violating Twitter’s rules to see if they can push the limits of free speech”.
Bouzy worries that the great flight of users of Twitter does not bode well for the platform, and it may end up being used less and less. According to him;
”I believe if users continue to deactivate their accounts en masse, it will become a significant problem for the platform.
”If left-leaning and marginalized people leave the platform, Twitter will not differ from Parler or Truth Social” .