In barely a year and a half, social networking website X has lost more than 1.1 million Belgian users, or a third of its total. And it is not only in Belgium that the number of X users is shrinking sharply; the decline is also big across the rest of Europe. So big that X has fewer European users today than before its acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.
If we take a quick look back, we see that in November 2023 - about a year and a half ago - X still had over 126 million European users. Today, that number is a quarter lower. In the last six months alone, X lost 11 million users in the EU, 10 per cent of the total.
The erosion continues even more sharply in Belgium. In November 2023, we counted almost 3.4 million users here. Today, 2.2 million of those remain, a third fewer. In the past six months, 11 per cent of users disappeared. Not so surprising: in the past few months, we heard reports day in, day out of organisations leaving the platform: mobility companies NMBS, De Lijn and MIVB, the trade unions, political party Groen (ecologist) and left-leaning newspaper De Morgen.
Compared to other EU countries, the decline in the number of X users in Belgium is relatively rapid. In Poland (-48%) and Luxembourg (-45%) X lost even more users X's transparency report shows. The decline is also slightly faster in Greece, Slovenia, Spain and Ireland than in Belgium.
‘Video clips on steroids’
‘X has become a kind of video sharing platform on steroids,’ says Tim Verheyden, social media expert at VRT NEWS. ‘There is hardly any interesting content left, unless you adhere to the political ideology that Elon Musk and X market. Here and there you can still find a Flemish opinion maker who makes his voice heard and reaches people. But that reach doesn't amount to much."
According to Verheyden, X is just too politically charged still to be an interesting multi-voice medium. ‘Moreover, TikTok is a much more interesting medium for, say, young people. X was actually already quite a small network. Musk was going to turn it into a giant marketplace of opinions. It has become a sewer."