Worries about X’s shrinking engagement and its fading power to send traffic to websites have been building for weeks, and the conversation has only gotten louder after a string of unflattering headlines for the Elon Musk-owned platform.
The latest flashpoint came from a public dispute between X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, and data analyst Nate Silver. At the center of the argument was a question that matters deeply to publishers, nonprofits, and creators: is X still a reliable place to promote work and drive readers to an external site, or has it become a platform where links go to die?
Soon after, a new analysis added fuel to the debate, suggesting that posts containing links tend to perform worse on X. The implication is simple and frustrating for anyone trying to grow an audience off-platform: adding a URL may reduce engagement not only on that post, but potentially on posts that follow.
Then another major signal arrived. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the most prominent digital rights nonprofits, announced it was leaving X after nearly two decades. In a blog post explaining the decision, EFF’s social media manager, Kenyatta Thomas, said the organization didn’t make the move lightly—but the numbers no longer justified staying active there.
EFF described a dramatic drop in visibility over time. Back in 2018, its posts on Twitter were pulling in roughly 50 to 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, despite publishing about 2,500 posts, the organization was seeing around 2 million impressions per month. Last year, EFF posted about 1,500 times and earned roughly 13 million impressions total for the entire year.
As Thomas summed it up, an X post today gets under 3% of the views that a single tweet delivered seven years ago. For any organization that depends on reach—whether to educate the public, fundraise, or mobilize supporters—that kind of decline is hard to ignore.
EFF says it will continue communicating on other major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, along with other parts of the open web. It also emphasized an important point that many nonprofits and newsrooms share: being present on a platform isn’t the same thing as endorsing it. Sometimes organizations stay simply because their audiences are there, and because people still deserve access to essential information wherever they scroll.
But EFF’s conclusion was blunt: X is no longer where the fight is happening.
The nonprofit joins a growing list of high-profile organizations and institutions that have distanced themselves from X over the past couple of years. That includes major news publishers, along with academics, celebrities, local governments, and more. Some left for reputational reasons or policy concerns. Others reacted to platform decisions and labeling controversies. But for many, the simplest explanation is increasingly the most compelling: if a platform no longer provides meaningful reach or referral traffic, it becomes much easier to walk away.
That shift comes at a brutal time for publishers. Referral traffic is more valuable than ever, yet harder to secure. Reader behavior is changing, search referrals are less dependable than they used to be, and social platforms have become less consistent sources of clicks. At the same time, AI tools are reshaping how people find information, often reducing visits to original sources. The result is mounting financial pressure on newsrooms, more layoffs, and more closures.
In that context, the Bier vs. Silver debate captured the broader tension perfectly. Bier argued that publishers are using X incorrectly—treating it like a headline-and-link wire service instead of creating posts designed to spark conversation directly on the platform. Silver pushed back with his own experience, saying that even when he invests more effort into driving on-platform discussion, the payoff in off-site traffic is still weak. He described external click-through as “middling,” estimating only a small percentage of readers move from an X post to his website. He also pointed out that in the platform’s earlier era, Twitter could account for a meaningful share of a publication’s total traffic.
Silver also highlighted another trend he believes is reshaping the ecosystem: engagement on X is increasingly dominated by political influencers, particularly on the conservative side, and many of the most viral accounts are not necessarily high-quality information sources. Musk dismissed Silver’s analysis in a short reply, intensifying the public back-and-forth but not resolving the core concern for publishers: does the platform still deliver results?
A separate review of posts from multiple large publishers appeared to support the idea that links are associated with weaker engagement on X. Whether that’s caused by any algorithmic behavior or simply reflects a platform where fewer users are interacting the way they once did, the outcome feels the same for anyone trying to build audience beyond X’s walls.
For publishers and nonprofits watching their reach shrink and their clicks dry up, EFF’s departure may be less of a surprise than a milestone—another sign that X’s role in the media and information ecosystem is changing fast, and not in a way that benefits those trying to drive readers to their own sites.
