Twitter users took flight after news of Elon Musk takeover, says firm
Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users deactivated their accounts in the days after Elon Musk’s takeover deal, the company says, as prominent users including Katy Perry and Barack Obama lost followers.
Since Monday, some of the social network’s biggest progressive voices have seen their public follower counts decline, while some rightwing Twitter users have gained followers, according to data from the analytics site Social Blade.
Perry, the pop star who is the site’s third biggest user, lost 7,000 followers in a matter of days, while Obama, whose 132 million followers makes the former US president’s account the most popular on the site, lost 5,000 on Tuesday alone. Followers of the former first lady, Michelle Obama, are down by nearly 20,000.
Taylor Swift’s Twitter account also had one of the biggest drops according to Social Blade’s data, losing 15,000 followers in 48 hours.
However, the changes have not been evenly distributed. The Republican senator Ted Cruz added more than 60,000 followers, while the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gained more than 100,000 followers in the last week, a tenfold increase in the normal rate.
Followers of the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, are up by nearly 10,000, but the Twitter account of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has lost just over 1,000 followers.
The disparity led to speculation that Twitter was taking action in preparation for its purchase by banning scores of “bot” accounts that had previously artificially inflated its userbase.
The social network said the changes were due to “organic deactivations”: normal users deleting – or creating – accounts in response to the news of Musk’s pending acquisition.
“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate
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