Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they find the fact that Musk has cozied up to Donald Trump. Then they’d leave. Or at least some of them did. For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.

But that may have changed. After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.

X has millions of users and can afford to shed some here and there. Many liberal celebrities, journalists, writers, athletes, and artists still use it—but that they’ll continue to do so is not guaranteed. In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. If the platform becomes akin to “alt-tech platforms” such as Gab or Truth Social, this shift would be good for people on the right who want their politics to be affirmed. It may not be as good for persuading people to join their political movement.

The number of people departing X indicates that something is shifting, but raw user numbers have never fully captured the point of what the site was. Twitter’s value proposition was that relatively influential people talked to each other on it. In theory, you could log on to Twitter and see a country singer rib a cable-news anchor, billionaires bloviate, artists talk about media theory, historians get into vicious arguments, and celebrities share vaguely interesting minutiae about their lives. More so than anywhere else, you could see the unvarnished thoughts of the relatively powerful and influential. And anyone, even you, could maybe strike up a conversation with such people. As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.

This is how you get something approaching Gab or Truth Social. They are both platforms with modest but persistent usership that can be useful for conservatives to send messages to their base: Trump owns Truth Social, and has announced many of his Cabinet picks on the site. (As Doug Burgum, his nominee for interior secretary, said earlier this month: “Nothing’s true until you read it on Truth Social.”) But the platforms have little utility to the general public. Gab and Truth Social are rare examples of actual echo chambers, where conservatives can congregate to energize themselves and reinforce their ideology. These are not spaces that mean much to anyone who is not just conservative, but extremely conservative. Normal people do not log on to Gab and Truth Social. These places are for political obsessives whose appetites are not satiated by talk radio and Fox News. They are for open anti-Semites, unabashed swastika-posting neo-Nazis, transphobes, and people who say they want to kill Democrats.  

Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social. Truth Social reportedly had just 70,000 users as of May, and a 2022 study found just 1 percent of American adults get their news from Gab. Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience. The reason right-wing politicians and influencers such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens keep posting on it instead of on conservative platforms is because they want what Rufo wants: a chance to push their perspectives into the mainstream. This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.

Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.

The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling. The X exodus won’t happen overnight. Some users might be reluctant to leave because it’s hard to reestablish an audience built up over the years, and network effects will keep X relevant. But it’s not a given that a platform has to last. Old habits die hard, but they can die.

As more and more contemporary films fail, producers and exhibitors fall back on time-tested fare to lure viewers back.

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The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.

The one I bought looked like any old antiperspirant, a solid white cream encased in a plastic applicator. But its instructions seemed unusual: “For best results, apply every night before bed and again in the morning.”

Every night?

I swiped it across my armpits before bed, and to my surprise, they were dry all the next day. I kept poking them in disbelief—deserts. But I would later discover that there isn’t anything particularly special about this product. Nighttime application improves the effects of any traditional antiperspirant, including those combined with deodorant (the former blocks sweat while the latter masks smell). Research has shown this for at least 20 years; none of the experts I spoke with disagreed. Yet many of us swipe our armpits in the morning before we head out for the day. Somehow, Americans are trapped in a perspiration delusion.

Putting on antiperspirant in the evening feels roughly akin to styling your hair right before bed. Both are acts of personal maintenance that people take not only for their own well-being but also in anticipation of interactions with others. This idea is reinforced by ads for antiperspirants, which tend to feature half-dressed actors getting ready in bathrooms or changing rooms; see, for example, the Old Spice guy. These ads also tend to mention how long their products work—24 hours, 36 hours—implying that their effectiveness starts to fade once they are applied. In a recent Secret commercial, a woman rolls on antiperspirant in a daylit bathroom, then scrambles to make her bus, relieved that she is prepared for such sweaty moments for the next 72 hours.

What these ads don’t say is that these products need the right conditions to work effectively. Antiperspirant isn’t a film on the surface of the armpit that stops moisture from leaking through, like a tarp over wet grass. Instead, it functions like a bunch of microscopic champagne corks, temporarily sealing sweat glands from spraying their contents. The active ingredient in most antiperspirants is some form of aluminum salt, compounds that combine with moisture on the skin to form “gel plugs” that dam up the sweat glands. These gel plugs prevent not only wetness but also odors, because bacteria responsible for foul smells thrive best in moist (and hairy) conditions, according to Dee Anna Glaser, a dermatologist and board member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society, a group that advocates for patients with excessive sweatiness.

Gel plugs are finicky. They need a little bit of sweat in order to form—but not too much. Antiperspirant applied in the morning isn’t ideal, because people sweat more during waking hours, when they’re active. If the armpits are too sweaty in the hours after application, the product gets washed away before it can form the plugs. The body is cooler and calmer during sleep. For gel plugs to form, “baseline sweating is optimal at nighttime before bed,” Glaser told me. Nighttime application has been shown to increase the sweat-reduction ability of normal antiperspirant from 56 percent to 73 percent.

But wait, I can already hear you thinking, what happens if I shower in the morning? Here’s the thing: Antiperspirant lasts through a shower. “The plugs won’t wash away much,” even though the residue and scent probably will, Mike Thomas, a former scientist with Procter & Gamble and an advocate for the International Hyperhidrosis Society, told me. After 24 hours or more, the plug naturally dissolves. Reapplying antiperspirant during the day can be beneficial, Shoshana Marmon, a dermatology professor at New York Medical College, told me. Still, it works best if applied to dry armpits that, ideally, stay dry enough for the plugs to form. For most people, Marmon added, putting it on “clean, dry skin at night” provides enough protection to last through the next day.

Again, none of this information is new or hard to find. One of the earliest studies demonstrating the value of nighttime application was published in 2004; it showed that applying antiperspirant in the evening, or twice daily, was significantly more effective than morning-only use. Indeed, the stance of the American Academy of Dermatology is that it’s best to put antiperspirant on at night. Media outlets have covered this guidance since at least 2009.

For the perpetually sweaty, discovering this guidance only now, after decades of embarrassing photos and ruined shirts, might spark belief in a grand conspiracy: They don’t want you to know the truth about armpit sweat. Indeed, it isn’t mentioned on the labels of most regular-strength antiperspirants. The reasons for this are more banal than nefarious. Most people don’t sweat excessively, so applying antiperspirant the usual way is sufficient. “Manufacturers may keep instructions simple to fit general habits, so the idea of using antiperspirant at night doesn’t always make it into mainstream awareness,” Danilo C. Del Campo, a dermatologist at Chicago Skin Clinic, told me. The difference between antiperspirant and deodorant still eludes many people and, in fact, may bolster the insistence on morning application. Deodorant is essentially perfume and has no impact on sweat production. It’s “best applied when odor control is most needed, typically in the mornings,” Marmon said.

When I asked brand representatives why so many antiperspirants don’t mention nighttime use in the directions, they pointed to the potential for confusion. “It’s a bit counterintuitive for people to use antiperspirant at night, because most people think of applying it as part of their morning routine,” Maiysha Jones, a principal scientist at P&G North America Personal Care, which owns brands such as Secret and Old Spice, told me. But, she added, it is indeed best to use it at night. “Antiperspirants are commonly assumed to be a morning-only product and applied during the morning routine,” Megan Smith, a principal scientist at Degree Deodorant, told me.

In other words, people are used to applying antiperspirant in the morning because companies don’t tell them about the nighttime hack … but companies don’t tell them because people are used to putting it on in the morning. Omitting helpful instructions just because they might be confusing isn’t doing America’s perspirers any favors. Anyone who’s ever experienced an overly moist underarm can surely be coaxed into shifting armpit maintenance back a measly eight hours. People go to far greater lengths to self-optimize, whether it’s teens adopting multistep skin-care routines, or wellness bros taking dozens of supplements.

The science is well established, and the guidance is clear. But the ranks of nighttime swipers may not increase immediately. Routines have to be reset, assumptions picked apart. Some evenings, I find it exhilarating to buck the orthodoxy of personal hygiene. Other nights, it gives me pause. Applicator hovers over armpit, brain stumbles on belief. Will this really last past the sunrise, through a shower, beyond the hustle of the day? Even after learning about the science, “some people just don’t believe,” Thomas said. All there is to do is try. In go the corks, out go the lights.