- The makeup of Twitter's userbase has shifted since Elon Musk struck a deal to buy the platform.
- Left-leaning accounts are losing thousands of followers, while right-wing users are gaining more.
- Twitter said the "organic" fluctuations were likely due to a wave of account creations and deactivations.
A day after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter was announced, some of the social network's most popular accounts lost hundreds of thousands of followers overnight, while others received an unusual surge in followers.
The platform said it saw an exodus of users on Tuesday, coupled with a wave of newly created accounts following the news of Musk's acquisition.
"While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation," Twitter said in a statement, according to NBC.
Twitter called the fluctuations "organic," per the outlet.
Politically left-leaning accounts appear to have borne the brunt of the shift. According to statistics from SocialBlade, among the most prominent users who lost followers was President Joe Biden, who saw a decline of 5,610 followers on Tuesday compared with his consistent daily average gain of 15,551.
Meanwhile, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who usually sees an average gain of 463 followers per day, lost nearly 37,000 followers over the last two days. And Ron Filipkowski, a defense attorney known for monitoring the right-wing activity, regularly clocks an average of 977 followers a day but lost 1,591 on Tuesday.
Former President Barack Obama's Twitter account, the most followed account on the site, also lost more than 300,000 followers since the buyout announcement, NBC reported.
Some celebrities' accounts also took a pounding: For instance, pop star Katy Perry's follower count dropped by 200,000 since the Monday announcement, per NBC.
Conversely, many accounts that saw a leap in followers belonged to right-wing politicians or pundits. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz's personal account gets a daily average of 1,165 new followers but enjoyed a bump of 24,929 extra followers on Tuesday, per SocialBlade statistics.
On the same day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida received 141,566 new followers compared with his usual daily average of 5,406. In addition, the account of right-wing pro-Trump broadcast news channel One America News Network also gained 13,568 followers on Tuesday, compared to 522 on average per day.
The swing in followers mirrors the elation that many Republicans have expressed over a perceived relaxation of Twitter's regulation of posts following Musk's buyout and the concerns of Democrats who worry that the billionaire will allow misinformation to run rampant on the platform.
Musk, who secured the social network for $44 billion, cited the importance of free speech in a statement about the purchase, calling it the "bedrock of democracy."
"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it," Musk said.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.