BY MURIEL SHORT
How Musk’s Platform Is Losing Its Grip on the UK
For nearly two decades, Twitter was the UK’s digital town square. It was where journalists broke news, politicians picked fights, and academics tested ideas. But since Elon Musk’s takeover and the rebrand to X, the platform has entered a state of serious decline. The numbers tell a brutal story.
According to Ofcom, the number of British adults using X has collapsed from 24 million in 2023 to just 19.4 million in 2025. That is nearly five million people walking away in two years. It gets worse. Daily mobile users have dropped by around 13% in the last year alone. And perhaps most tellingly, 70% of British users still call it ‘Twitter,’ a quiet but emphatic rejection of the new regime.
The financials are just as dire. The UK arm of X recently filed accounts showing turnover plummeting from £69 million in 2023 to under £29 million in 2024. To put that in perspective, in 2022, the year Musk took charge, the figure was over £205 million. Pre-tax profit has cratered accordingly. Advertisers and publications have fled in droves, spooked by concerns over content moderation and brand safety. Kantar now ranks X as the least-trusted major advertising platform on earth. Some big brands have crept back, but their spending is a fraction of what it once was.
The exodus is particularly stark among institutions. Charities are leaving in large numbers, citing extremist content and dwindling engagement. High-profile organisations like ACEVO, the Race Equality Foundation, and trans charity Mermaids have all quit. Academia is reaching a tipping point too. Research suggests UK universities are abandoning X en masse, with no signs of return. Recent scandals, including the use of Musk’s AI tool Grok to generate sexualised deepfakes of children, have triggered an Ofcom investigation and threats from the government to strip X of its right to self-regulate.
As credible voices flee, alternatives are filling the void. Meta’s Threads has overtaken X in daily mobile usage globally, offering a smoother, less chaotic experience. Meanwhile, Bluesky has become the favoured retreat for journalists, academics, and researchers. PRWeek reports that journalists are now posting more frequently on Bluesky than on X. Altmetric data shows research has been shared on Bluesky five million times since January 2025, and while the volume remains lower than X’s, the engagement is considered far more valuable for those in research and education.
Technical instability is compounding the misery. The platform has suffered multiple global outages in 2026 alone. In January, tens of thousands of UK users were locked out. Further disruptions hit in February. For businesses, the algorithm has turned hostile. X now suppresses external links so aggressively that reach for posts containing them has dropped by as much as 94%. Brands are being forced to either pay for X Premium or accept that the platform is useless for driving website traffic.
There is, however, an accidental upside to all this. As the sensible people leave, X is increasingly becoming a self-contained echo chamber. It is a digital attic where trolls, grifters, and conspiracy theorists can shout at each other, convinced they are shaping the national conversation. In reality, they are just shouting into an empty room. By clustering on X, they are conveniently removing themselves from the platforms where the rest of the country actually spends its time. They are contained, annoying each other rather than polluting the real world, while everyone else gets on with their lives. It is the digital equivalent of slamming the attic door shut and leaving them to it.
The picture is unmistakeable. X is in retreat across the United Kingdom. A combination of shrinking users, collapsed revenue, institutional departures, and regulatory scrutiny has broken its grip. It may still have some value for real-time news and niche audiences, but its role as the nation’s public square is finished. The future of British discourse now looks set to be split between the polished walls of other social media platforms. For X, the decline is terminal as toxic social media platforms face their Big Tobacco moment.
Having spent much of her working career at Ogilvy, Muriel Short works for a well-known SEO/SMM business in London.