Sawt Falasteen - Numbers using 'QuitX' service swell before Trump inauguration

Researchers behind the service -- dubbed "HelloQuitX" in a play on the name of Japanese cartoon cat Hello Kitty -- say they are offering tools for people wanting to escape the "toxic" social network.

Uptake is "accelerating and internationalising", said David Chavalarias, a mathematician with France's CNRS public research body, ahead of the service going live on Monday evening in France.

"Previously we were taking in one million connections a day. Two days ago, it was 1.5 million. Now it's four million," he told AFP.

Chavalarias' "connections" refer to follower/following relationships on X -- reflecting users' choices of whose posts they want to see in their feeds.

The millions of connections stem from "thousands of people" signing up for HelloQuitX, he said.

A steady stream of prominent people and organisations has been leaving X altogether or leaving accounts fallow since Donald Trump's election.

The billionaire candidate was strongly backed by tycoon Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and has since renamed it.

"The usefulness of our presence (on X) is outweighed by the many side-effects we endure," French centre-left daily Le Monde's chief Jerome Fenoglio wrote in a Monday op-ed as the paper announced it would stop posting.

Musk had made X into "an extension of his political action", Fenoglio added, calling on the European Union to uphold standards of public debate and verified news.

Chavalarias' project, put together in collaboration with rights groups, attempts to overcome the "network effect" that keeps people attached to digital platforms used by friends or other contacts -- even if they themselves would prefer another service.

By downloading data from X about their connections there, HelloQuitX "allows you to reconnect automatically... on the accounts you have on BlueSky and Mastodon," he said.

"It doesn't mean leaving X completely in the sense of closing your account... it means exploring elsewhere," Chavalarias added.

The mathematician said Musk was "influencing the 500 million X users", including by pushing his own posts into everyone's feed.

X is "a social network that is basically manipulated on several levels", he added.

Chavalarias said that he and his colleagues have been attacked by "online fascists" for their role in HelloQuitX.

"I've had death threats, we've had threats of attacks against the whole team," he said.

Such people are "trying to convince people that we're misusing French public funds for political ends... in a battle against Elon Musk".

Rather, all HelloQuitX aims to do is "build a bridge between two universes" online, Chavalarias insisted.

T.Samara--SF-PST