The mayor of Paris leaves X, the symbol of a massive leak from Elon Musk’s social network?

Anne Hidalgo announced Monday that she was deleting her account from the social network X, the former Twitter bought by billionaire Elon Musk. The elected official denounces the excesses, like other personalities around the world. Despite these criticisms, X’s influence still seems great.

Anne Hidalgo is one of the first French political figures to leave the social network Twitter, now called “vast global sewer” responsible for a “disintegration of our democracies”. She is not the only one to denounce the excesses of X since its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022.

Lack of moderation, hateful content, disinformation… There are also personal attacks on the social network. Anne Hidalgo, for example, is currently being targeted for her recent trip to Tahiti, combining the organization of the Olympic Games and a private stay. The hashtag “Tahiti Gate” has been used 80,000 times since the beginning of November, according to the web monitoring company Visibrain. There is also this “Saccage Paris” campaign, the hashtag of which has been used more than two million times this year. These are criticisms from opponents and residents of the mayor’s management of the capital.

Anne Hidalgo therefore prefers to slam the door, as former Prime Minister Manuel Valls has already done in France, for example, after his defeat in the legislative elections in 2022. Abroad, this is also the case for actors Jim Carrey and Whoopi Goldberg, or even the model Gigi Hadid. Despite everything, in France as at the global level, very few celebrities recently decided to close their Twitter account. There is no massive movement of departures.

We don’t know how many people have left X since it was taken over by Elon Musk. On the other hand, the management of the platform claimed at the end of September to have 245 million daily active users around the world. Whether or not this is the right figure, there were 254 million before the billionaire’s takeover. So that’s at least nine million deserters. It’s a lot, but the social network nevertheless retains great power of attraction. It is essential for following the news in real time and it has no equivalent at the moment. No competitor is capable of housing so much information, even if it takes a lot of sorting.

What is more worrying for X are the defections on the advertiser side. Some brands are now hesitant to advertise on this platform. Since the start of the school year, 200 companies have interrupted or are considering interrupting their marketing campaign, like Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Microsoft or Amazon. Walt Disney, Ubisoft and Warner Bros Discovery stopped their investments a few days ago, after a message of support from Elon Musk for anti-Semitic remarks.

According to the New York Times, the old Twitter could lose up to $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year. This figure is disputed by the social network. For its part, the Reuters institute reveals that X’s advertising revenues in the United States have fallen by 55% year over year, every month since November 2022.