Is X Really the 'Digital Town Square'?

When Elon Musk first agreed to acquire Twitter in April 2022, he called it “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” After getting the impression that many of the people in that town square are in fact robots that have no say in the future of humanity, he tried to back out of the deal only to change his mind in October and go through with the deal.

But even without bots, Twitter, or X as it's now known, may not be the digital town square its owner sees or once saw in it. The platform’s 200+ million daily active users are a long shot from the billion plus people using Facebook and Instagram on a daily basis and looking at its reach across several countries shows that X shouldn’t be mistaken for the real world. Then again, given the platform's minimal efforts at content moderation, the picture of the town square is quite accurate. After all, every town square has a at least one person shouting obscenities at the world or spreading wild conspiracy theories to those passing by.

According to Statista Consumer Insights, just 24 percent of U.S. adults regularly use X, with the platform’s reach even smaller in major European markets such as France and Germany. For comparison, the same survey found that 70 percent of respondents in the U.S. use Facebook, 50 percent use Instagram and 40 percent are on TikTok regularly.