After Nicholas Campiz was evacuated from kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, in February 2022, he remained glued to Twitter. As battles raged across the country, he followed them on the app, staying up many nights in a hotel room in Tbilisi, Georgia, to read updates as they came in, one tweet at a time.
“As more Ukrainians came to Twitter to tell their story, a lot of good accounts of them emerged,” Campiz said.
When war broke out this month in Israel and Gaza, Campiz, 40, a cartographer now living in Florida, took to Twitter again. But his timeline on the app, which was renamed X, was filled with posts from accounts he didn’t recognize and content that had been discredited, he said.
With the war in Ukraine, “Twitter was invaluable because you could connect to accounts that provided good information,” he said. “I feel really helpless in this issue between Israel and Gaza because now on Twitter, the ability to do that has simply disappeared.”
It’s been a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter. Since then, the meaning of the social networking service has changed (sometimes drastically) for many of the people who use it.
In interviews, Twitter users, content creators and social media experts said that what had once been a trusted news source for them now needed a more skeptical eye. Some said a delightful source of spontaneity, community and humor had become much more combative. Others said they believed Musk had released a heavily censored environment.
“I really enjoyed the interaction between certain people,” said Lauren Brody, 54, a human resources manager in the San Francisco Bay Area and a longtime Twitter user. “Some things seem very spontaneous and charming, sometimes a little scary, but you have to see different points of view.”
Now “I have seen a difference,” he added. “I have seen images that are not acceptable and a little scary. I try not to go down too many rabbit holes.”
What Twitter means to people was transformed after Musk, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, overhauled the service. He spent $44 billion on the platform with the goal of enabling more freedom of expression and turning it into an “everything app” for conversations, payments, deliveries and more. He renamed it X, relaxed its content moderation rules, eliminated the jobs of about 80 percent of its 7,500 employees and changed its authentication practices.
People are visiting the site less frequently, according to data collected by digital intelligence company Similarweb. Traffic to X’s website fell 14 percent over the past year, even as the platform still ranks alongside Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat as the sites and apps most visited by Americans.
X did not respond to a request for comment. At a company meeting Thursday to mark the anniversary of the deal, Musk said, “We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, sort of like Twitter 1.0, to the app for everything.” He added that X had about 500 million monthly users, according to audio heard by The New York Times.
The change has been especially felt by users who found communities on Twitter. The platform was known for its subcultures, which based their nicknames on their unifying interests: Black Twitter for pop culture, comedy and activism; Weird Twitter for unhinged joke posts; K-pop Twitter for devotees of the music genre.
Some communities have now withered. Bryan William Jones, 53, a professor of visual neuroscience at the University of Utah, often chatted with other academics and pursued his hobby of photography on Twitter. He found interesting scientific research shared with the hashtag #ICanHazPDF and used the site to organize meetings with other photographers.
“It’s a small world and Twitter made it a lot smaller, in the best way,” he said.
But many of the people in Dr. Jones’ Twitter communities have left over the past year, complaining about misinformation and spam, he said. He has also reduced his use of
Some users have attempted to preserve stories about their experiences on A popular Twitter story, a project led by former employees and Twitter users to commemorate the time they spent there. At an event held in March for the project, topics included “why we need a history of the ‘people’” and “did the Twitter we depended on…gone?”
For others, Musk has changed X for the better. Twitter’s former leaders were too censorious, they said, and Musk has been refreshingly transparent in revealing internal communications from the company’s previous managers and allowing suspended accounts to return.
“I can’t say I agree with the people who were censored before, but I am incredibly offended that it was allowed to happen,” said Peter Wayner, a technology writer in Baltimore. “I can think for myself. “I don’t need a Trust and Security Council to do it for me.”
The biggest change has been the loss of serendipitous moments, including romantic connections and stimulating discoveries, that Twitter once generated, some users said.
Asawin Suebsaeng, 35, a political reporter for Rolling Stone, met his wife on Twitter almost a decade ago. “It really gave you an advanced idea of the type of person you were dealing with: what her interests were, her sense of humor, her priorities, what makes her rightly angry,” he said.
Ted Han, a software developer in the San Francisco Bay area, stopped for an early morning coffee in Grand Junction, Colorado, during a cross-country trip with his wife in 2015. He posted a photo on Twitter of a sculpture he saw. in the city, and a user I didn’t know responded saying he recognized the location.
Han, now 41, said he had exchanged messages with the stranger, who suggested he take a particular exit off the highway once he reached Moab, Utah. Han and his wife ended up taking that route and were stunned by the views of the Colorado River cutting through the bright orange canyon walls.
“That was one of those moments for me where I thought, ‘Oh, this is exactly what Twitter is for,’” Han recalled.
Now, he said, he is wary of posting information about his whereabouts on X because of how heated conversations on the platform have become.
“I feel less comfortable with what I share on Twitter and think twice,” he said.
ryan mac contributed with reports.
