Twitter has seen the highest proportion of Danish social media users quit its platform during the last two years, the trade union Ingeniørforeningen (Danish Society of Engineers, IDA) said in a press statement on Friday.

The figures for changing Danish SoMe habits come from a survey conducted by Analyse Danmark on behalf of IDA.

In the survey, 34 percent of Danish users said they had left Twitter within the last two years. Some 15 percent said they had stopped using Snapchat, while 10 percent have dropped Instagram and 21 percent quit TikTok.

A large part of the explanation for Twitter’s growing unpopularity in Denmark can be linked to US billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the company in autumn 2022, IDA’s IT expert Kåre Løvgren said in the statement.

Musk’s takeover heralded wide-ranging changes on the social media site.

“Many users appear to have had enough of the chaos that hit Twitter after Elon Musk stepped into the director’s room and initiated mass firings.

“Since then, they have reopened access for a lot of users who had previously been thrown off because they broke Twitter’s ethical codex – including former US president Donald Trump,” he said.

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The apparent drop-off in Danish users appears to be in line with an international study by Insider Intelligence which predicts 30 million users will leave Twitter over the next two years because of an increase in hateful content and technical problems on the platform.

“Twitter is facing massive challenges on several fronts and many of them can be traced to the sudden and drastic changes effected by Elon Musk. That appears to have scared many users away and Twitter is now very different to how it was two years ago,” Løvgren said.

Some 17 percent of the Danish social media users in IDA’s survey said they currently use Twitter. The most popular social media platform according to the survey is still Facebook, which 89 percent said they use regularly.

Instagram is the second-most popular platform after Facebook with 62 percent using it regularly, followed by YouTube (58 percent), Snapchat (47 percent) and TikTok (21 percent).

Five percent in IDA’s survey said they had quit Facebook during the last two years.

“This is probably part of Facebook’s status as a modern community centre,” Løvgren said.

“Many associations and sports clubs use Facebook to communicate with their members and that makes impossible in practice for many to leave Facebook.

“That way, Facebook has become an integrated communication platform and calendar in many Danes’ lives, even though most of us know that Facebook abuses our data for marketing and has many skeletons in its closet,” he said, noting the Cambridge Analytica scandal as one such past controversy at the company.

The survey was based on answers from 2,000 Danes aged between 18 and 70.