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Twitter lost more than 1.3 million users in the week after Elon Musk bought it

  • Around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1, the report said
  • Twitter users should expect big changes to the site as Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, seeks to boost revenue

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Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on November 4, 2022. Photo: AP

In the week after Elon Musk purchased Twitter for US$44 billion, the social media platform lost more than 1.3 million users.

The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks behaviour on Twitter by analysing more than 3.1 million accounts and their daily activity, “believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1”, according to a report by the MIT Technology Review.

That is more than double the usual number, the report said.

“We have observed an uptick in people deactivating their accounts and also Twitter suspending accounts,” Christopher Bouzy, Bot Sentinel’s founder, told the outlet.

He went on to say that he and Bot Sentinel calculated the numbers by looking at the proportion of users they analyse, who had deactivated their accounts or been suspended after Musk took over, and then applying that percentage to Twitter’s overall user base, which stands at about 237 million “monetisable daily active users”.

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