X Traffic Peaked After Election Day in US. So Did Deactivations

On the same day that X was attracting the most US visitors, it had the most account deactivations since Elon Musk took charge

On Wednesday Nov. 6, as Americans were absorbing the news of Donald Trump’s election as president, X attracted 46.5 million visits from within the US to x.com, according to Similarweb estimates – more than any day within the past year and about 38% higher than an average day in recent months.

On the same day, more than 115,000 US web visitors deactivated their accounts – more than on any previous day of Elon Musk’s tenure, during which many users who disagreed with his politics or his style have threatened to leave the service. That finding is based on tracking visits to the confirmation page on x.com (and previously twitter.com) that users see after confirming they want to deactivate their accounts. The previous peak was about 65,000 on December 15, 2023, shortly after Elon Musk restored the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, attributing the decision to an informal poll he had conducted.

We don’t have similar tracking for users who used the X mobile app to deactivate their accounts.

Key takeaways

• X’s US web traffic had already set a record for the year on election day with 42.3 million visits, then climbed another 10% the following day to 46.5 million.
• The increase in daily active users for the X mobile apps was not as dramatic – elevated over previous days but no higher than it was during the Republican National Convention.
• Web traffic and daily active users for Bluesky increased dramatically in the week before the election, and then again after election day. For several days, Bluesky’s website (bsky.app) had more traffic than Threads (threads.net), which had not previously been the case. Threads is far ahead of Bluesky in mobile app usage, however.
• Truth Social web and app engagement was up on Tuesday and Wednesday, but not as high as some days during the Republican National Convention.
• Worldwide, Nov. 6 was the year’s second highest day of web traffic to x.com — 173.3 million visits, compared with 175.5 million on July 14, the day after the assassination attempt on Trump.

Twitter.com and X.com

Here is the daily traffic pattern for the X service, which transitioned from twitter.com to x.com as its main domain in May, including the Nov. 6 peak.

X deactivations and broader trends

At the same time that some Americans were turning to X to either celebrate or complain about Trump’s victory, a fraction of them were preparing to swear off the service for good. Here is the pattern we see with confirmed account deactivations on X.

While the effect was most pronounced in the US, on Nov. 6 was also a peak day for account deactivations worldwide, more than 281,600, according to Similarweb estimates. Back in November 2022, we reported that more than 200,000 people quit Twitter (as it was still called at the time) over the course of a weekend, as Musk took ownership of the platform. There have been since been some other other days with more than 200,000 deactivations following various controversies.

Some users swearing off the X service will presumably stop using it, or use it less, without necessarily deactivating their accounts. Whether there will be a measurable decrease in the audience for X as the result of politics remains to be seen. By the weekend, X usage had tapered off to a more typical level over the past year.

On the other hand, X’s recent daily peak in US traffic doesn’t make up for the erosion in audience the service has seen over the past couple of years since Musk took ownership of the service.

On a global scale, X has done better but still not equaled the COVID-fueled traffic highs of early 2020.

The Bluesky surge

Bluesky has been in the news recently, attracting rising interest particularly in Brazil (boosted by a period during access to X was blocked by the government) and in the UK. In the US, some journalists, politicians, and news junkies have also been talking up Bluesky as a better X alternative than Threads, the app Meta Platforms launched as a spin-off of Instagram.

In the US, Bluesky got more web visits than Threads in the immediate aftermath of the election. For context, it’s important to note that both services are app centric, even though they support a web user interface.

By app usage, Threads remains far ahead of Bluesky, and both services saw usage increase around the time of the election. If web visits turn out to be good news for Bluesky, it will be because website visitors learned enough about the service to be motivated to download the app.

Truth Social engagement up (but not that much)

The Truth Social website (truthsocial.com) drew about 982,000 visits on election day, but that’s less traffic than it got on some days of the Republican National Convention (1.4 million on July 14).

Truth Social’s mobile got about 200,000 daily active users in the US on Nov. 6, which is about 8% higher than previous peaks within the past year.

For perspective, here is where the daily user counts were on Nov. 6 for Truth Social compared with X, Threads, and Bluesky.

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Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".