X’s decline in engagement and its ability to drive traffic is the topic du jour, with several days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network.

Over the weekend, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, and data analyst Nate Silver, previously of FiveThirtyEight, feuded over whether or not X was still capable of sending traffic to publishers. This was followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which suggested that adding links to X posts is bad for engagement.

On Thursday, the prominent digital rights group and nonprofit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) announced it, too, was leaving X after seeing decreasing returns from its posts.

In a blog post, EFF’s social media manager, Kenyatta Thomas, said that leaving X after almost 20 years on the platform wasn’t “a decision we made lightly,” but explained that the math no longer works out in its favor.

In 2018, EFF’s posts to Twitter saw between 50 and 100 million impressions per month, she said. By 2024, its 2,500 posts on the social platform generated around 2 million impressions per month. Last year, EFF’s 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.

“To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago,” Thomas wrote.

The organization will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and elsewhere on the open social web, noting that its presence on a platform is not an endorsement of these services.

“We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we’re posting on,” Thomas said. “X is no longer where the fight is happening.” (Ouch!)

EFF is one of many organizations to ditch X, following other high-profile exits that have included various news publishers like NPR, PBS, The Guardian, Le Monde, and others, as well as many academics, celebs, local governments, and more.

The news organizations may have had various reasons to leave X, but traffic could have kept them around. For some, like NPR and PBS, the departure was a reaction to Musk’s decision to falsely label them as “state-affiliated media,” a title typically reserved for mouthpieces of governments that lack editorial independence — such as Russia and China-based propaganda networks. For others, like Le Monde, it was a reaction to Musk’s close ties with Trump.

But it’s easier to take a stand when you have little to nothing to lose.

Today, any source of traffic is highly valuable, as publishers deal with shifts in online consumer behavior. AI usage is ramping up, killing traffic to publishers at the same time that news sites are seeing declining referrals from search engines and Facebook. That’s left many newsrooms to fold under the financial pressure or conduct layoffs.

In Bier’s debate with Silver, he accused newsrooms of using X wrong.

Bier stressed that news outlets like The New York Times should be posting in a way to encourage conversation on X’s platform, not just using X as a news feed to publish a simple headline and a link. Silver, however, pointed out that even when he did the work to generate on-platform discussion, it didn’t provide much of a lift in terms of traffic to his website.

“The conversion to off-site traffic is very middling,” Silver wrote on X. “Maybe 2-3% of the readership for a Silver Bulletin article instead of ~1%.” By comparison, he noted that Twitter used to send FiveThirtyEight around 15% of its traffic.

Even some of Silver’s detractors seemed to agree with his assessment of X, which he published in a newsletter. Namely, X is now dominated by conservative influencers, and many top accounts in terms of engagement are low quality. (For instance, Silver pointed out that the account “Catturd,” a right-wing influencer known for spreading conspiracy theories, sees more engagement than The New York Times.)

Musk, of course, dismissed this analysis, calling Silver’s data “bullshit” in a reply.

OpenAI announced on Thursday something that power users have been asking for forever: a $100/month plan. Until now, plans were priced at: free (which now includes ads), an $8/month Go plan (that also includes ads), a $20/month Plus plan (ad free), and then all the way up to a $200 Pro plan (also ad free).

OpenAI’s pricing plan page currently does not list a $200/month plan at all. However, that highest tier is still available, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch.

The model maker says Plus (which remains at $20/month) and the new $100 Pro tier are geared to support daily usage of ChatGPT’s coding tool Codex. The $100 Pro plan will offer 5x more Codex than the Plus plan.

OpenAI makes no bones that this new pricing tier is to challenge Anthropic, which has long had a $100/month option for Claude.

“The new $100 Pro Tier is designed to give developers more practical coding capacity for the money, especially during high-intensity work sessions where limits matter most. Compared with Claude Code, Codex delivers more coding capacity per dollar across paid tiers, with the difference showing up most clearly during active coding use,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells TechCrunch.

One thing to know: OpenAI is offering even higher limits of Codex on the $100 plan through May 31. So anyone who tries the new tier, goes relatively mad with coding and never gets a rate warning: Be advised that such a situation likely won’t last.

None of the plans offer unlimited usage. The $200 plan, however, offers 20× higher limits than Plus. The model maker promises on its FAQ that this is enough to support “your most demanding workflows continuously, even across parallel projects.” Both Pro plans offer the same core features. The main difference is the rate limits, the company says.

The spokesperson also says that more than 3 million people globally are using Codex every week, “up 5x in the past three months, with usage growing more than 70% month over month.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Thursday his office will investigate OpenAI for its alleged harm to minors, potential to threaten national security, and its possible link to a shooting that took place at Florida State University last year.

“ChatGPT may likely have been used to assist the murderer in the recent mass school shooting at Florida State University that tragically took two lives,” Attorney General Uthmeier said in a video posted to social media.

On the day of the FSU shooting last April, the suspect allegedly asked ChatGPT how the country would react to a shooting at FSU, and what time it would be busiest at the FSU student union. These messages could potentially be used as evidence against the suspect in an October trial about the shooting.

The attorney general cited further concerns about ChatGPT’s encouragement of suicide in certain instances, which have been documented in multiple lawsuits brought by families against OpenAI. He also mentioned his concern that the Chinese Communist Party could use OpenAI’s technology against the United States.

“As big tech rolls out these technologies, they should not — they cannot — put our safety and security at risk,” he said. “We support innovation. But that doesn’t give any company the right to endanger our children, facilitate criminal activity, empower America’s enemies, or threaten our national security.”