Bye bye birdie. Why brands are leaving X.
A parable
At its peak, Twitter was like Gotham City. It wasn’t perfect — it was messy, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous. But under Jack Dorsey, it had a kind of vigilante order. He was Twitter’s Batman: flawed but principled, holding the chaos at bay with a vision for what the platform could become. Then came the $44 billion buyout.
Enter Elon Musk — the Harvey Dent of Twitter. Charismatic, brilliant, and promising to fix everything. But just like in The Dark Knight, the pressure of power twisted that idealism. And thus, Harvey Dent became Two-Face: unpredictable, polarising, and fuelled by a new kind of chaos.
Twitter didn’t collapse overnight — it simply became something else. A place with a familiar skyline but a new set of rules. For many brands, it’s no longer Gotham — it’s something closer to Arkham. However, unlike in DC, Batman is nowhere to be seen trying to stem the chaos.
And that’s the moment we’re in now: not mourning a death, but recognising a transformation. One that demands a smarter, more strategic approach to social media.
The bird takes flight
Long before it became a battleground of billionaires and burner accounts, Twitter was something far simpler: a weird little microblogging platform where you could say what was on your mind – as long as it fit in (the very concise) 140 characters.
It launched in 2006, mid-MySpace, pre-Instagram, in the golden age of text-based status updates. It wasn’t particularly beautiful. It didn’t have filters, stories or stickers. But it moved. Conversations happened in real time. Ideas travelled faster than ever before. And for the first time, you could tweet directly at your favourite celebrity, your local MP, or that one loser complaining about meal deals on the train – and they might actually respond.
By the early 2010s, Twitter had found its identity: the platform for news, politics, comedy, chaos, and culture – all unfolding simultaneously. It was the digital town square, and everyone got the chance to be the squawking town crier. Unlike Facebook, it didn’t pretend to be your family dinner table. Twitter was a pub argument, a press briefing, and a punchline machine all in one.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and Twitter became essential.
The pandemic era
With the world in lockdown, people turned online not just for entertainment but for connection, information, and sanity. Twitter was suddenly the frontline – a place for breaking news, public health updates, and government communications (some more helpful than others). It became where the scientists lived, where the journalists broke stories, and where brands got brave.
Remember “We’re all in this together”? Twitter is where that phrase was tested in real time.
However, for businesses, Twitter wasn’t just a soapbox – it was a strategy. It became a hub for:
- Customer service that was quick, human, and public.
- Brand voice that felt authentic, clever, or at least meme-literate.
- Community building with niche following and loyal fans.
- Lead generation and B2B visibility, especially in tech, media, and marketing circles.
If you were a brand with something to say – and the nerve to say it well – Twitter could make you famous overnight. Or infamous, if you weren’t careful. AlphaQuad’s copywriter Lewis was once ganged up on for suggesting that heterosexual celebrities pandering to queer audiences with homoeroticism during Pride Month maybe didn’t have the best optics. He isn’t still bitter about it, though.
So why was it ever up for sale?
By 2021, Twitter had massive cultural influence but not-so-massive profits. Its growth had stalled. Its ad model wasn’t keeping pace with the likes of Facebook and Google. And behind the scenes, investors weren’t thrilled. Jack Dorsey – Twitter’s co-founder and occasional CEO – had stepped down. Again. And without a clear commercial roadmap, the platform looked increasingly like a legacy tool in a world of TikToks and algorithms.
Enter Elon Musk. With a meme in one hand and $44 billion in the other.
The $44 billion ego trip
What began as a tweet – how very fitting – turned into one of the most chaotic tech acquisitions in modern history.
In April 2022, Elon Musk declared he was buying Twitter. Why? Depends on who you ask. Free speech absolutism? A dislike of moderation policies? A cosmic joke with $44 billion as the punchline? Or perhaps all three? At first, it wasn’t clear if the offer was real. Then it was. Then it wasn’t. Then it was, again. Then he tried to back out. Then he was sued. And finally, in October 2022, the deal closed.
And just like that, Twitter was no longer a publicly traded company. It belonged to Musk. All of it. What followed wasn’t so much a takeover as a teardown. Musk didn’t just want to run Twitter. He wanted to dismantle it and rebuild something entirely different in its place.
Layoffs, lockdowns, and blue tick bedlam
What followed was less a transition, more a purge. Within weeks of Musk taking over, Twitter’s internal structure was gutted. Entire departments were wiped out in mass layoffs – from content moderation and accessibility to trust and safety, human rights, public policy, and communications. Musk’s new Twitter, it seemed, wouldn’t be guided by teams of experts but simply by pure vibes. And maybe…polls?
The company’s workforce shrank by more than half. In some cases, employees were fired via email. Others found themselves locked out of work systems overnight. The people who had spent years building systems to combat misinformation, abuse, hate speech, and spam were suddenly gone. The digital infrastructure that kept Twitter just about on the right side of chaos had been dismantled – not replaced, just…removed.
Then came the paid verification debacle. The once prestigious blue tick, previously a marker of credibility and public interest, was now up for grabs at $8 a month. And with it came impersonation mayhem. Users were quick to spot the loophole: why be yourself when you could be anyone? Fake accounts impersonated brands, celebrities, and even pharmaceutical companies.
Musk had promised a platform free from the elitism of legacy verification, but what he delivered was a platform where trust was for sale and confusion reigned. Real accounts were drowned by fake ones. The value of being “verified” was diminished to a punchline. And for advertisers, this was yet another red flag.
Twitter wasn’t just in transition. It was in freefall. A case study in what happens when you take a high-functioning machine, remove the engineers and assume it’ll keep running on momentum and vibes alone.
From Twitter to X
In July 2023, Musk took a flamethrower to Twitter’s identity. The brand name? Gone. The iconic blue bird? Plucked, stuffed, and roasted. The term “tweet” itself? Abandoned in favour of the term “post”. All scrapped in favour of a single, ominous letter: X.
This wasn’t just a rebrand. It was a signal. A way of saying: the platform you knew is gone. Musk envisioned X as an “everything app” – a hub for social media, payments, banking, shopping, video, AI, and more. Think WeChat meets Reddit meets PayPal, with a sprinkling of 2009 internet chaos. But there was one problem: people hadn’t asked for this.
The transformation was abrupt, confusing, unfocused, and for many, alienating. For a platform built on cultural relevance, X landed with the elegance of a dropped bowling ball. Users didn’t flock to the new name. The media mocked it. Even the app store listing looked half-finished.
For brands, it made a risky platform even harder to navigate. How do you build trust on a platform where the brand itself seems unsure of what it wants to be? Where the rules change weekly? Where the name has changed, but the chaos remains?
Twitter didn’t just die – it was buried, rebranded, and reanimated. And X? It feels less like a phoenix and more like Frankenstein’s monster with a Tesla sticker slapped on for good measure.
The rise of the Alt-Right echo chamber
It wasn’t just the infrastructure that changed. The tone did, too. Accounts previously banned for hate speech or dangerous misinformation were reinstated. Moderation policies were rewritten – or just ignored. Musk began tweeting conspiracy theories, memes, and provocations from his personal account (now the de facto PR department for the entire platform).
It’s not that X became alt-right overnight, but it certainly became more hospitable to those voices. What was once a place for all sides to argue became a place where some users no longer felt safe to speak at all.
For brands, that shift was seismic. You don’t want your ad for eco-friendly kitchen spray showing up next to a tweet about climate denial. You don’t want your campaign for inclusivity nestled between slurs and suspensions. Brand safety wasn’t just a risk. It was a daily roll of the dice.
So, where did everyone go?
Away. Or at least, elsewhere. Some of the biggest advertisers in the world — Apple, Disney, Coca-Cola — quietly reduced spending or paused entirely. Celebrities deactivated. Journalists moved to Mastodon, Bluesky, or Substack. Even some long-time power users just… stopped tweeting.
It wasn’t always loud or dramatic. Some brands simply stopped replying to mentions. Some stopped posting altogether. Others left their accounts frozen in time — last active around the time the blue bird disappeared. Social teams began advising against investment, not because the numbers tanked overnight but because the risk began to outweigh the reward.
Meanwhile, alternative platforms began to rise, slowly but steadily. Mastodon offered decentralised community control. Bluesky flirted with a return to what Twitter once was. Threads, despite its Meta DNA, promised a calmer, brand-safe alternative. And for certain demographics, TikTok and Reddit absorbed much of the real-time energy that Twitter used to own.
The vibe had changed. And brands knew it. For years, Twitter had been the go-to for real-time engagement. Now, it was starting to feel like shouting into a void — except the void was angry, under new management, and charging you a monthly subscription to even shout in the first place.
Where do brands go from here?
If Twitter is dead – or at least undead, reanimated, and renamed – where should brands turn their attention?
The answer isn’t a straight swap. It’s not about jumping to the next shiny platform and hoping for the best. It’s about being smarter, more strategic, and more selective. The social landscape in 2025 isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about showing up where your audience already is – and where your brand can actually thrive.
For some, that’s LinkedIn – a space for thought leadership, industry visibility, and B2B relationship-building. For others, it’s TikTok or Instagram, where creative content and visual storytelling still rule the feed. And for the emerging players – Threads, Bluesky, and even YouTube Shorts – the opportunity lies in experimentation and early adopter energy.
Whatever the channel, the message is the same: social media has changed. Your strategy should, too.
At AlphaQuad, we help brands navigate the chaos with clarity. We don’t just manage platforms – we help you choose the right ones. Ones that align with your voice, your audience, and your goals. If the death of Twitter has left your social strategy in limbo, maybe it’s time to rethink how and where you show up online. It’s not just about being seen anymore. It’s about being seen in the right places, for the right reasons, by the right people.
