Social and politics

Europe abandons X: the decline of Elon Musk's platform

Social X, owned by Elon Musk, loses millions of users in Europe due to its founder's extreme ideology and the spread of online hatred

6 May 2025

2' min read

Between October 2023 and March 2024, X, the social (formerly Twitter) owned by Elon Musk, recorded in Italy a monthly average of 8,016,904 active users. One year later, according to data contained in the DSA Transparency Report published in April 2025, the figure dropped to 7,824,833. The drop is 2.4 per cent: modest compared to the collapse seen in the rest of Europe, but still indicative of a broader trend.

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At the European level, the picture is much sharper. In just six months, X lost over 11 million monthly active users, dropping from 111.4 to 100.4 million. In France, users dropped by 2.7 million; in Poland by around 1.8 million; in Germany by 1.3 million. This is the clearest sign of the crisis that the platform has been going through since its acquisition by Elon Musk in the autumn of 2022.

Supremacist drift

The extreme ideological imprint of its owner has affected the identity of the platform. In many European countries, X is perceived as the propaganda ground for sovereignist and far-right forces.

Demonstrations by its founder over time were not lacking. On 25 January 2025, Musk participated in a video-linked Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) election event in Halle, Germany. During his speech, he called the AfD 'the best hope for Germany' and urged Germans to be 'proud of German culture and values', criticising what he called an excessive focus on guilt for the past.

A few months earlier, in October 2023, he had shared on X a meme containing the emoji of the "clown world", a symbol used in white supremacist circles to make neo-Nazi propaganda, mock progressive values and promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

The extreme right-wing drift of the platform owner is leading to a now obvious side effect: users, especially in Europe, are stopping using X.

In Italy, in 2024, there was a significant increase in hate speech on the X platform, as highlighted by the eighth edition of the Map of Intolerance, carried out by Vox - the Italian Observatory on Rights in collaboration with the Università Statale di Milano published on 7 March. According to the report, 57% of the analysed tweets contained hate messages, with women as the most targeted category (50%), followed by Jews (27%), foreigners (11%), Muslims (5%), people with disabilities (4%) and the Lgbtq+ community (3%)

The abandonment of European institutions

In November 2024, the Internationales Auschwitz Komitee, an organisation founded in 1952 in Vienna by survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp, announced its withdrawal from X, citing the rise of anti-Semitism and hatred on the platform. Executive vice-president Christoph Heubner described X as a 'communication machine' where verbal violence and misinformation have become a daily occurrence.

Institutions such as the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz and the Jüdisches Museum München also joined the initiative.

Meanwhile, the European Commission continues to investigate X. The formal proceeding, initiated in December 2023 for suspected violations of the Digital Services Act, concerns in particular the handling of illegal content and the lack of transparency on algorithms.