In the week after Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, the social media platform lost more than 1.3 million users.
MIT Technology Review reported the firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their daily activity, “believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between Oct. 27 and Nov. 1.”
That’s more than double the usual number, the outlet is reporting.
“We have observed an uptick in people deactivating their accounts and also Twitter suspending accounts,” Christopher Bouzy, Bot Sentinel’s founder told the outlet.
He went onto say he and Bot Sentinel calculated the numbers by looking at the proportion of users they analyze who had deactivated their accounts or been suspended after Musk took over, and then applying that percentage to Twitter’s overall user base, which stands at about 237 million “monetizable daily active users”.
Musk could not immediately be reached by USA TODAY.
But on Monday night he tweeted, “Twitter usage is at an all-time high lol.”
He then replied to his own tweet saying, “I just hope the servers don’t melt!”
From Oct. 27 through Nov. 1, MIT Technology Review reported, Bot Sentinel found 11,535 accounts they were monitoring had been deactivated (someone shut down their own account).
In addition, 6,824 accounts had been suspended, which happens when Twitter removes accounts for reasons including inactivity, inauthenticity or a violation of site rules, the outlet reported.
