More than 30 million users are expected to leave Twitter over the next two years as concerns mount over technical issues and the proliferation of offensive content after Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover, according to a forecast.
The number of global monthly users is predicted to fall by nearly 4% next year and 5% in 2024 – more than 32 million in total – in the first annual declines forecast by the market research agency Insider Intelligence since it began tracking the social media platform in 2008.
“There won’t be one catastrophic event that ends Twitter,” a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, Jasmine Enberg, said. “Instead, users will start to leave the platform next year as they grow frustrated with technical issues and the proliferation of hateful or other unsavoury content.
“Twitter’s skeleton staff, working around the clock, won’t be able to counteract the platform’s infrastructure and content moderation problems.”
Its report anticipates that Twitter will lose more users in the US, its biggest market, than any other country, with numbers declining 8.2 million over the next two years. By the end of 2024, US user numbers are forecast to fall to 50.5 million, the lowest level since 2014, as the Twitter becomes “more unstable, and less pleasant”.
In the UK, Twitter will lose about 1.6 million users over the next two years, to a base of 12.6 million, Insider Intelligence said.
It predicts that while disillusioned users leaving the platform will occur across all age demographics, the biggest concentration of departers will come from the under-25 and over-45 age groups, which “aren’t as loyal and are less willing to tolerate a degrading experience”.
Insider Intelligence has also slashed its forecast for ad revenue growth for Twitter from 22% in 2023 and 16% in 2024 to “essentially flat”, as advertisers pull back, pause or stop advertising over growing brand safety concerns on the platform.
In November, the research company cut its outlook for Twitter’s ad revenue growth by 40% this year.
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“Musk’s primary focus in 2023 will be kickstarting Twitter’s revenue engine, after losing many of its biggest advertisers and a long tail of other advertisers who have been quietly quitting the platform,” it said.
On Monday, Twitter abruptly dissolved its trust and safety council, an advisory group of nearly 100 independent civil, human rights and other organisations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform, moments before a meeting scheduled with the company.
The unpopularity of the takeover by Musk, who has fired thousands of employees and told those remaining they had to work long hours at high intensity, was summed up when the world’s richest man received a 10-minute chorus of booing from a crowd of 18,000 when he joined the comedian Dave Chappelle on stage in San Francisco on Sunday night.