Progressive Twitter users in ‘mass deactivation’ after Elon Musk’s near $62bn takeover deal

Twitter is investigating a big drop in users as some of its high-profile left-leaning account holders including Barack Obama lose hundreds of thousands of followers.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Space X, reached an agreement to purchase social media platform Twitter for nearly $62bn. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP

Twitter says that mass deactivations on its social media platform were organic but is investigating, after progressive users seemingly left the website in droves after Elon Musk struck a deal to buy the group for nearly $62bn.

Some high-profile progressive accounts, like US president Barack Obama, lost approximately 300,000 followers over the past day, while musician Katy Perry – Twitter’s third most followed account – lost more than 200,000 followers in 24 hours.

Some conservative accounts meanwhile spiked. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is strongly against mask mandates and vaccination requirements gained nearly 100,000 followers after Twitter announced it had agreed to a deal for Elon Musk to acquire it. Donald Trump Jr, the former President‘s son, gained 87,000 new followers in one day.

“We’ve been looking into recent fluctuations in follower counts,” a Twitter spokesman told The Australian.

“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely have been a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation.

“We’ll continue looking into these follower count fluctuations and keep you updated.”

Research from tech news publication The Verge found that overall, influential conservative accounts have increased their followers accounts at about ten times the daily average, while popular progressive accounts have collectively lost hundreds of thousands of followers.

Those wild fluctuations have seemingly not been replicated in Australia, with both Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison maintaining their respective mild daily growth rates on Twitter. Greens leader Adam Bandt has lost about 25 followers in the past few days, while One Nation leader Pauline Hanson‘s follower account has grown by about 10.

Mr Musk on Tuesday shocked the tech world announcing an agreed deal to take over control of Twitter in an acquisition worth about $61bn, one of the largest deals in tech history.

The entrepreneur may be in hot water already, however, after he potentially breached his agreement with Twitter that he could tweet about the merger but “so long as such tweets do not disparage [Twitter] or any of its representatives.”

Oh man this is amazing. No random public announcements (that's normal) except Elon Musk is allowed to tweet about the deal (lol) but not if he insults Twitter. I'll get back to the previous topic in a second, but this was too delightful to ignore. /9 pic.twitter.com/57ltmUIwAI

— Raffi Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) April 26, 2022

On multiple occasions, Mr Musk has tweeted comments that could be considered disparaging remarks about Twitter. He weighed in to a tweet by conservative journalist Saagar, who tweeted a story from Politico that Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer, had cried in a meeting about the Musk takeover.

Mr Gadde was responsible for suspending the New York Post from Twitter over a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022

Mr Musk also responded to a tweet by right-wing activist Mike Cernovich that Twitter lawyer Jim Baker had “facilitated fraud.”

Mr Musk replied “Sounds pretty bad …”

If either Twitter or Mr Musk back out of the deal, they will have to pay a $US1bn penalty, and it’s yet to be seen if the executive’s latest tweets will ultimately threaten what will be one of the largest tie-ups in tech history.

The New York Post reported that Twitter employees are struggling with the news.

“We’re all going through the five stages of grief in cycles and everyone’s nerves are frazzled,” one senior staff software engineer, reportedly wrote on the company’s internal Slack channel.

“We’re all spinning our wheels, and coming up with worst case scenarios (Trump returns! No more moderation!).

“The fact is that [Musk] has not talked about what he’s planning on doing in any detail outside of broad sweeping statements that could be easily seen as hyperbolic showboating.”

Slack co-founder Cal Henderson told The Australian in an interview on Wednesday that the deal has sent shockwaves across the industry.

“It’s a weird one because it’s a semi-hostile privatisation. Among tech it has such an important place in the narrative, and it just seems like it’s going to be chaos now.

“I have a lot of friends who work at Twitter who are very unhappy with the news, so we’ll see what happens.”