Twitter users fell by a fifth in the US last year as tweeters complain about an overly aggressive algorithm and too many TikTok-style animal videos since the site was renamed ‘X’

Twitter’s U.S. user base has plummeted by nearly a fifth in just one year (losing about 300 million U.S. visits per month) amid reports that the app is inundated with “unmarked, spammy ads” and an “insane number of cat videos ‘.

DailyMail.com has heard from several frequent users that the algorithm has become ‘extremely strong’, with the social media site becoming a much less reliable aggregator of breaking news.

Others said they’re seeing a record number of tweets from people they don’t follow and aren’t interested in, compared to the era before the site was renamed “X.”

And the anecdotes seem to be backed up by user polls, data analysis reports, and repeated user “posts” (formerly “tweets”) expressing similar experiences.

But Musk has nevertheless pushed ahead with plans to transform the microblogging site, which he acquired for $44 billion in October 2022, into an “everything app” similar to the Chinese app WeChat.

Although the billionaire has announced a peer-to-peer payment system for X users in 2024, with traffic plummeting, it is an open question which peers will still be logging into .

According to Similarweb, X lost about 19 percent of visits from its US user base in 2023.

Considering that the site generates a quarter of its net profit total traffic from the United States, this means that X has lost 300 to 328 million site visits every month from America alone.

And users worldwide are also losing the habit of visiting the site – which was once the destination for crowdsourced breaking news: ‘Daily Active App Users’ have fallen from 141 million to 120 million (13.5 percent), based on a study by Apptopia.

But the decline in user visits was less pronounced abroad.

Traffic from Great Britain fell by only 11.6 percent; traffic from France, down 13.4 percent; traffic from Germany fell by 17.9 percent; and Australian traffic is showing a similar trend, down 17.5 percent, according to Similarweb.

A poll conducted by Research Co. and Glacier Media in Canada has identified some of the top reasons users are fleeing X.

Of the most popular complaints, four topped the poll: extremism (14 percent), “fake news” (14 percent), “toxicity” (12 percent) and advertising (12 percent).

Users also blamed racism (six percent), bad updates (five percent), a lack of local news in their algorithm (five percent) and Elon Musk directly (five percent).

While there has been a general pullback in traffic to all social media sites and online communities since September of last year, down 3.7 percent year-over-year, the double-digit declines Musk’s X has experienced are notable outliers.

And some of its competitors are flourishing, including Chinese micro-video app TikTok, which saw a 22.8 percent year-over-year spike from September.

Similarweb noted a 16.5 percent drop in traffic to the site’s advertiser dashboard, meaning fewer advertisers are bothering to check metrics on the platform or post new ads.

According to data from Sensor Tower, fewer than 54 advertisers remain of X’s 100 largest ad buyers to date.

The investment fund Fidelity, which helped finance Musk’s Twitter takeover and now has a significant stake in X Holdings, has now slashed the value of its X shares by 71.5 percent.

Shrinking almost three-quarters of the site’s value would mean that the social platform is no longer worth it $44 billion by October 2022, when Musk acquired it, to about $12.5 billion.

In September, Musk had projected an even more dire scenario, stating that X’s U.S. advertising revenue had fallen by 60 percent since his purchase.

By his calculations, X could be worth only $4 billion.

But the story of the old social media site’s demise is perhaps best told through the angry messages from its frustrated users.

One user, Rajneesh Jain, posted directly to Musk: “If you and (your) stupid algorithms are so interested in pushing tweets with videos of dogs and cats, why not fill your @twitter offices with them? ‘

Another user, who mainly used sites to monitor comic book culture, complained, “My TL (timeline) is overrun and overrun with garbage.”

“I’m not a cat person but the #AI keeps showing cat related #Tweets #Post,” said one user, echoing another’s complaint about the “insane amount of cat videos.’

Elsewhere online, Reddit users have complained about X’sunmarked, spammy ads.’

Several more systemic issues appear to have led to the dramatic reversal of what was once Twitter’s fortunes.

Critics have cited Musk’s stripping of the company’s workforce; his willingness to reinvigorate a variety of controversial figures, including bankrupt “Sandy Hook truthman” Alex Jones; its own ignition points; and questionable rebranding exercises in Twitter’s continued decline as X.

Last summer,

And this month, data analytics firm Fedica identified 202 bot accounts that had apparently been secretly synced directly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In the last 30 days, every account was found to have automatically responded to another X account with ChatGPT’s now infamous automated non-response: ‘I’m sorry, but I cannot complete this request because it violates OpenAI’s use case policy.’

As Musk critic, writer and former Media Matters editor-in-chief Parker Molloy put it: post a video from the ChatGPT bot problem to Instagram’s X ‘alternative’ Threads: ‘Twitter is a ghost town.’

And, like TechCrunch. Addressing the issue, he noted, “Many bots and bot farms run without the help of OpenAI and are harder to detect.”

But it’s not all bad news for Musk’s fast-growing “everything app.”

Traffic to Elon Musk’s own profile on the platform and the billionaire’s frequent posts have increased by an estimated 96 percent year over year — according to the Similarweb analysis in September — under his leadership.