Twitter in 2025: Still Loud, Still Weird, Still Here (Against Everyone’s Better Judgment)

By Just Another Freaked Out Occupier
December 31, 2025

The Year Twitter Refused to Cooperate With Its Obituaries

If 2023 was the year Twitter was pronounced dead and 2024 was the year pundits argued over the autopsy, 2025 was the year the patient walked out of the morgue and demanded Wi-Fi.

Now officially branded as X, the platform spent the year surviving in the most Twitter way possible: loudly, messily, and while irritating nearly everyone who predicted its collapse. It did not return to its old dominance, but it also did not implode. Instead, it stabilized into something smaller, sharper-edged, and far less interested in being liked.

Users: The Platform Everyone Claims to Have Left

X insists its user base is larger than ever. Independent analysts shrug, because Musk-era X deliberately made verification of those claims difficult. Monthly active users are widely estimated in the hundreds of millions, while daily engagement fluctuates wildly depending on news cycles and outrage velocity.

What is clear: when something breaks — wars, elections, scandals, disasters — people still end up on X. Not because it’s pleasant, but because it’s fast. Twitter has become less of a town square and more of a fire alarm with opinions.

Money: Lean, Mean, and Still Ad-Dependent

After the post-acquisition freefall, 2025 marked a financial floor, not a renaissance. Advertising revenue reportedly ticked upward, helped by smaller advertisers and relentless cost-cutting. Subscriptions and creator payouts padded the edges, but ads still pay the rent.

This is not the old Twitter money machine. It’s a slimmer operation that learned how to survive on fewer calories. That’s not a comeback story — it’s a survival story.

Features: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

This was also the year X tried very hard to become an “everything app.” Messaging upgrades, audio and video calls, long-form posts, creator monetization tweaks, AI experiments, and endless interface changes rolled out in rapid succession.

Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. Grok, the platform’s AI companion, oscillated between clever and deeply embarrassing. Payments were teased. Commerce was promised. The future remained permanently “coming soon.”

The issue wasn’t ambition. It was coherence. X in 2025 felt less like a finished product and more like a live laboratory.

Culture: Polarization as a Feature, Not a Bug

Politically and culturally, X leaned into what it had become. Moderation debates never cooled. Community Notes expanded, trust did not. Power users flourished. Casual users either lurked or drifted away.

X didn’t merely reflect polarization — it optimized for it. And yet, journalists, governments, activists, and critics continued to rely on it because there is still no real replacement for real-time, global argument.

As Crocker put it late this year:
“X didn’t collapse because collapse requires consensus. What it did instead was become indispensable to people who dislike it — and that may be the most stable position a platform can occupy.”

An Observation You Can Take to the Bank

No dominant platform survives eighty years. We’ve seen it with Sears, Montgomery Ward, Kmart, F. W. Woolworth Company, Old Country Buffet, and Gimbel’s — brands that once defined everyday life and then forgot what made them matter. Twitter launched in 2006. By 2086, it will be eighty years old, and it will not exist — not because it imploded, but because culture moves on. Platforms don’t die in scandals; they die when the next generation never bothers to log in and forgets the mission that first set them in motion.

References (APA)

Musk, E. (2023–2025). Public statements and platform updates regarding X. X Corp.

Reuters. (2024–2025). Coverage of X Corp. advertising revenue, legal disputes, and regulatory actions.

Tech Policy Press. (2024). EU regulatory actions and Digital Services Act implications for X.

Pew Research Center. (2023–2025). Social media usage and engagement trends.