The Blubber

Per MIT Technology Review:

The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1. That’s more than double the usual number.

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

Bouzy and Bot Sentinel arrived at their numbers by looking at the proportion of users they analyze who had deactivated their accounts or been suspended after Musk’s Twitter takeover, and then applying that percentage to Twitter’s overall user base, which currently stands at around 237 million “monetizable daily active users”.

From October 27 through November 1, Bot Sentinel found that 11,535 accounts they were monitoring had been deactivated—meaning someone chose to close an account down. A further 6,824 were suspended, which happens when Twitter proactively removes accounts for inactivity, inauthenticity, or violation of site rules. That’s approximately 0.59% of the accounts Bot Sentinel monitors.  In the week before Musk bought Twitter, only 5,958 accounts were deactivated or suspended, suggesting a 208% increase in account losses in the days after the purchase went through.