EFF Leaves X as Platform Traffic Plummets for Publishers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has officially ended its two-decade presence on X, marking one of the most significant departures from the platform to date. The digital rights nonprofit confirmed the move on Thursday, citing a sharp, sustained decline in the effectiveness of its posts as the primary driver for the exit.

Kenyatta Thomas, the organization’s social media manager, detailed the shift in a blog post, noting that the decision was not made lightly. The data behind the departure highlights a stark change in how the platform functions for institutional users compared to previous years.

The Decline in Reach

The numbers provided by the EFF illustrate a dramatic collapse in visibility for the group’s content:

• 2018: The organization recorded between 50 and 100 million impressions per month.
• 2024: With 2,500 posts, impressions dropped to roughly 2 million per month.
• 2025: The downward trend continued, with 1,500 posts yielding only 13 million impressions for the entire year.

“To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago,” Thomas explained. The organization maintains that it will continue its outreach on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, emphasizing that staying on a service does not equate to an endorsement of its policies.

“We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we’re posting on,” Thomas added. “X is no longer where the fight is happening.”

A Broader Industry Exodus

The EFF joins a growing list of high-profile entities that have abandoned X, including news outlets like NPR, PBS, The Guardian, and Le Monde. While some organizations left due to specific policy disputes—such as the “state-affiliated media” labeling or concerns regarding the platform’s political direction—others are leaving due to the declining utility of the site as a traffic driver.

Recent public debates have intensified the scrutiny of X’s current algorithm. Data analyst Nate Silver recently engaged in a dispute with X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, regarding the platform’s ability to funnel traffic to external publishers. Silver noted that even when he dedicated significant effort to generating on-platform engagement, the conversion rate remained negligible.

“The conversion to off-site traffic is very middling,” Silver wrote. He pointed out that while Twitter once provided roughly 15% of the traffic for his former outlet, FiveThirtyEight, it now contributes only a fraction of that, even with high-effort content.

The Challenge for Publishers

A report from NiemanLab corroborated these concerns, suggesting that including links in posts negatively impacts engagement. While X leadership has denied that the platform actively downranks such posts, the data suggests a broader shift in user behavior.

As publishers face shrinking referral traffic from search engines and other social networks, the struggle to maintain reach on X has become a point of contention. Silver’s analysis, which suggested the platform is increasingly dominated by low-quality, high-engagement accounts, was dismissed by Elon Musk, who labeled the findings as “bullshit” in a public reply.