Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users deactivated their accounts in the days after Elon Musk’s takeover deal, the company says, as prominent users including Katy Perry and Barack Obama lost followers.
Since Monday, some of the social network’s biggest progressive voices have seen their public follower counts decline, while some rightwing Twitter users have gained followers, according to data from the analytics site Social Blade.
Perry, the pop star who is the site’s third biggest user, lost 7,000 followers in a few days, while Obama, whose 132 million followers makes the former US president’s account the most popular on the site, lost 5,000 on Tuesday alone. Followers of the former first lady, Michelle Obama, are down by nearly 20,000.
Taylor Swift’s Twitter account also had one of the biggest drops according to Social Blade’s data, losing 15,000 followers in 48 hours.
However, the changes have not been evenly distributed. The Republican senator Ted Cruz added more than 60,000 followers, while the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gained more than 100,000 followers in the last week, a tenfold increase in the normal rate.
Followers of the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, are up by nearly 10,000, but the Twitter account of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has lost just over 1,000 followers.
The disparity led to speculation that Twitter was taking action in preparation for its purchase by banning scores of “bot” accounts that had previously artificially inflated its userbase.
The social network said the changes were due to “organic deactivations”: normal users deleting – or creating – accounts in response to the news of Musk’s pending acquisition.
“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation,” Twitter said.
The partisan division in which users have gained or lost followers reflects the perception among many on the political right that Musk’s ownership of the social network will lead to a relaxation of moderation rules which, they say, disproportionally censor conservative voices.
Musk has fanned those flames by tweeting that he was a “free speech absolutist” and arguing that he was “against censorship that goes far beyond the law”. He said: “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.”
Nour Kteily, a professor in management and organisations at Northwestern University, Illinois, said: “How ‘free speech’ arguments get mobilised isn’t politically neutral.
“Research suggests that free speech arguments are often used in motivated ways. People like free speech when those doing the speaking say things we want to hear, but downplay it when the voices are saying things we find objectionable.
“Often, free speech arguments have been used specifically to protect statements targeting disadvantaged and marginalised groups, including the type of speech that’s been banned from platforms like Facebook and Twitter because it falls – according to their content moderators – under the banner of hate speech.”
Musk has also highlighted the growth of Truth Social, the social network founded by Donald Trump to provide a haven for those same users. “Truth Social is currently beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store,” Musk pointed out on Wednesday.
But despite the apparent wave of account deletions, the initial response to the merger appears positive for Twitter’s users.
The social network may lag behind Truth Social on Apple’s App Store, but it is in second place – a substantial increase from its typical position, closer to number 30 in the charts and far behind competitors such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
