Twitter’s top users are posting less since Musk takeover last year, Pew Survey shows

Power Twitter users still visit the app but post less on it since Elon Musk’s acquisition late last year, according to a Pew Research Center study.

“The Center’s new analysis of the site’s actual behavior finds that the most active users before Musk’s acquisition — defined as the top 20% by tweet volume — saw a noticeable drop in posting in the months afterward,” the study’s authors wrote Wednesday . “These users’ average number of tweets per month has decreased by about 25% since the acquisition.”

Also, about six in ten US adults who used Twitter in the past year said they had recently taken a break from the service, and a quarter of the group indicated they would not use Twitter in a year, the survey said.

The new data underscores the challenges facing Twitter’s incoming CEO Linda Iaccarino, who will replace Musk. She will take over the ailing social media service, which has lost a number of advertisers in the past few months amid concerns that racist and otherwise inappropriate content has flourished since the Musk takeover.

Iaccarino, who recently resigned from her position as NBCUniversal’s global advertising director, will have to rebuild her relationship with Twitter advertisers and navigate content moderation. Musk has cut the company’s workforce by about 80% to roughly 1,500 employees, getting rid of some people he needed to keep, he acknowledged in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Musk said. “So there’s no question that some of the people who were released probably shouldn’t have been released.”

The Pew study also found that the majority of Twitter content is produced by a small group of power users.

“Since Musk’s acquisition, the 20% of US adults on the site have produced 98% of all tweets to that group,” the study said.

When asked for comment, Twitter responded with its now-customary emoticons.

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