GoKawiilX’s decline in engagement and its ability to drive traffic is the topic du jour, with several days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network.
Over the weekend, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, and data analyst Nate Silver, previously of FiveThirtyEight, feuded over whether or not X was still capable of sending traffic to publishers. This was followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which suggested that adding links to X posts is bad for engagement.
On Thursday, the prominent digital rights group and nonprofit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) announced it, too, was leaving X after seeing decreasing returns from its posts.
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X.
This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵(1/5) — EFF (@EFF) April 9, 2026
In a blog post, EFF’s social media manager, Kenyatta Thomas, said that leaving X after almost 20 years on the platform wasn’t “a decision we made lightly,” but explained that the math no longer works out in its favor.
In 2018, EFF’s posts to Twitter saw between 50 and 100 million impressions per month, she said. By 2024, its 2,500 posts on the social platform generated around 2 million impressions per month. Last year, EFF’s 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.
“To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago,” Thomas wrote.
The organization will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and elsewhere on the open social web, noting that its presence on a platform is not an endorsement of these services.
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